Where Am I Now When I Need Me

Inconvenient Magic: Stephen King in the Real World

2011-12-28T08:10:00.000-08:00

Stephen King has made me afraid to go down a flight of basement steps in the dark. I’ll never forget the 1976 Pennsylvania power blackout that interrupted my reading his novel Carrie aloud to my girlfriend: we screamed like children and huddled in bed for an hour before either of could get up the nerve to go looking for flashlight. King has made me pump my fist in vengeful satisfaction, like when the little girl in Firestarter finally started incinerating the bad guys He’s even put me at the edge of my seat – literally; I actually fell off on one occasion … I think it was when the dead cat leapt out of the kitchen cabinet in Pet Sematary.

But his new novel gets the one response he’s never managed to provoke before: it made me cry. No chest heaving sobs or sentimental caterwauling; but I couldn’t deny the bittersweet prickle in the eye as I came to the end of his most recent book, 11/22/63. That’s because the people are real, however fantastical their situation, and the way they reconcile themselves to their bizarre, tragic fate holds an austere beauty that will remain with me long after the book is done. As usual with King, there is a supernatural pretext for the story – in this case time travel. But it’s the people themselves that hold King’s interest now.

The story begins when school teacher Jake Epping finds out about a worm hole in time, incongruously located in the store room, behind the kitchen of an old friend’s diner. Al Templeton has been ducking back into April of 1958 for several years, mostly to get cheap beef from Eisenhower-era butchers. Each time he goes back the past resets itself, so he may have been getting the same beef every time. He feels like he has disproved the Ray Bradbury “butterfly effect”, dramatized in the short story “A Sound of Thunder”, where time travelers kill a Jurassic butterfly and create tiny changes that mutate and metastacize over a few million years, ending up with an almost unrecognizable present day (Someone very much like Newt Gingrich is president ….hmmm).

Al returns to a basically unchanged world each time, renewing his faith in the durability of the space-time continuum; and making him dangerously ambitious. He conceives a plan to prevent the Kennedy assassination. He does massive research – as King did, and learns all about Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife Marina and their dysfunctional family life.

But the deed itself turns out to be intractably difficult. First of all, the worm hole isn’t a gull-wing DeLorean with a handy ‘flux capacitor’; in classic King style, it’s just a hole and it always leads to one place and one time: Lisbon, Falls, Maine, behind the textile mill, in April, 1958. That means there’s a lot of time to kill before the assassination – time enough to figure out whether Oswald really acted alone, or even did the deed at all. Killing an innocent man – or one disposable cell of a giant conspiracy – would be an exercise in futility.

No matter how long you stay in the past, only two minutes go by in the present, so Al hasn’t used much ‘present time’ in his quest. But it has taken years off his real life, years spent in ‘the land of Ago’ -- and on top of that he’s gotten sick. Al is dying and he needs to appoint a deputy.

Jake gets the job.

His first trips orient him to a world where a five cent root beer tastes deliriously wonderful, everyone smokes all the time, and cars still have fins. He also meets the ‘yellow card man’ a mysterious bum who seems to live near the worm hole in 1958, and becomes increasingly unhappy about the sudden appearances of dazed individuals from 2011.

Putting the ‘butterfly theory’ to a more stringent test, Jake decides to stop a gruesome mass murder that wiped out the family of one of his extension students. Harry Dunning, , the limping high-school janitor struggling to earn his GED , described the event in a halting “The moment that changed my life” essay. Harry’s alcoholic father killed Harry’s mother as well as his brother and sister on Halloween night, 1958, leaving Harry with a shattered leg, crippled for life.

Jake figures if he can stop that horror and come back to an intact world, the fabric of reality will be able sustain the rescue of JFK also. Without going into the details, the mission doesn’t work out quite as planned. But reality seems sturdy enough to absorb the tweaking.

So Jake goes back in earnest, with a stash of 1958 money, Al’s notes on Oswald and a cheat sheet of sports results to keep him afloat financially.

He starts out living in Dallas, after a detour to Derry, Maine to improve the results of his last meddling with Harry Dunning’s family, now reset. The side trip to Derry is a little treat for long-time King readers, especially those who feel that It, his 1986 epic, was a masterpiece and a crowning achievement (He spoke of retirement for the first time, after that novel was published). The events chronicled in It take place in the 1980s, when the characters are in their thirties, and also in 1958, when they were kids. The evil in Derry is cyclical and though they fought it to a standstill as children they knew they might have to brace for a rematch someday. One interesting point the book makes is that the gang was actually better equipped to deal with the Grand Guignol nightmares of Derry, Maine as innocent kids than they were as chastened, compromised grown-ups.

Anyway: Jakes arrives in Derry just after the first round, and crosses paths with Richie Tozier and Beverly Marsh, giving us a glimpse of two beloved characters from the earlier novel, as they practice the lindy-hop amid the ruins of a picnic. Jake loves dancing, and gives them a quick lesson. Beverly says there were bad things going on in Derry but that’s all over now: everything is fine.

Like time travelers ourselves, we Stephen King fans know better.

Jake hates Derry, and as it turns out he hates Dallas, too. The Book Depository has an evil brooding look to it – just like something out of a Stephen King novel! One quick glimpse at the photograph that adorns the top of Part Five of the novel confirms that impression: it’s a creepy place.

Jake moves to the nearby town of Jodie, gets a job teaching school and falls in love with the new librarian, Sadie Dunhill. It’s a slow- burning easy-going affair, a friendship that starts with him catching her as she trips (she’s a little clumsy), and kindles into love with a few spins on the dance floor. She’s actually quite graceful, when she looks where she’s going.

And as Jake Epping likes to say: Dancing is life.

ButJake, now calling himself George Amberson, has much more on his mind than romance and the school curriculum. He’s tracing Oswald’s movements, pre-bugging the apartments where the family is going to life, gathering the evidence of a conspiracy and making his decision. I hesitate to ‘spoil’ the plot here, but the simple logic of story-telling does seem to require that George not only attempt to stop the assassination, but also succeed. It’s the natural direction of the narrative; it’s hardly a ‘spoiler’ to suggest that a stream will flow downhill.

It’s the rapids along the way that matter.

George decides to stop Oswald but the past has a kind of resistance to it. The past doesn’t want to be changed. Circumstances confound you as you try to wreak that special havoc, as if reality had its own immune system. Downed trees, flat tires, stalled elevators and more all tangle up the plan as the natural order flexes to protect itself. If anything can go wrong it will: Murphy’s Law applied with a supernatural vengeance.

But it has never been easy to take advantage of the supernatural, in Stephen King’s world. Some Puritan part of him needs to extract a heavy toll for power vision or skill beyond the ordinary. I think of the father in Firestarter, whose modest telepathic powers gave him crippling migraines, or the psychic little boy in The Shining whose mental spark roused a whole hotel’s worth of hibernating spooks. The power to bring back the dead didn’t do the hapless protagonist of Pet Sematary much good, and knowing the future was a kind of brain tumor for Johnny Smith, thw doomed hero of King's last Cssandra-with-a-gun story. Foreknmowledge doesn’t do much for poor George Amberson, either. He makes his long-shot bets, and wins them of course; but they bring him to the attention organized crime and soon he has mobsters chasing him. They actually catch him and the brutal beating they administer almost wipes out his memory.

Sadie, meanwhile has been attacked a disfigured by a crazy ex-husband, but George consoles himself that he might be able to change that by another round trip into the past. At least he can take her with him into the shiny new post-JFK survival future, with no Viet Nam war and possibly no Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King assassinations, where micro laser surgery might heal her face in a way that the crude surgical technologies of the cold war era cannot.

The story narrows down into a cattle chute of almost unbearable suspense, as George and Sadie (She knows who he is by this time, and believes it, and shares his mission) hobble and lurch toward their appointment with a revised destiny. I suppose there are some spoilers here, but I confess I often read the end of books early, just to make the suspense bearable. If you find that habit bizarre, and want your reading untainted, stop here and come back when you’re finished with the book. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of days.

Anyway, if you’re still with me -- they manage to stop the assassination, but Oswald kills Sadie and George makes a long desperate run to Lisbon Falls and the worm hole. To go through, to re-set, to start all over again even if he’ll now be five years older than Sadie: to make everything right. But the crazy old alcoholic is still there, and his yellow card is darkening fast. It turns out his job is to guard the worm hole – he’s from some unimaginable future himself. All these tweaks to the world’s time line have set up clashing harmonic vibrations. There are too many of them. The whole of reality could shatter like the glass in that memorex commercial. George must go to the future, and if it turns out to be as horrific as the yellow card man fears, come back once more just to re-set it all and cut off the vibrations. No second chances, no preventing the JFK assassination or Sadie’s injury – not even a glass of root beer!Just a quick, one day-return ticket to set the world to rights.

He almost refuses: the fabric of reality and the space-time continuum seem pretty abstract compared to the chance of seeing Sadie again, whole and healthy, and all the time they could have together, and the chance of saving her from the crazy ex-husband and making a life with her, even if that life and everything around it is heading off some bizarre string theory cliff that only a physicist could understand.

But here's the problem: he’s seen enough of that future to know it’s anything but abstract, and the blighted hellscape he returns to in the new 2011 leaves no room for doubt. George can’t save Kennedy or Sadie, or even himself – but he has to at least try to save the world.

So he goes back once more, and resets time, and returns to an intact 2011, complete with the Warren Report and the Tet Offensive, 9/11, the Iraq War and everything else. By comparison with the radio-active dystopia his good intentions created, it looks pretty good.

And he goes on the internet and finds out that Sadie is still alive. Eighty years old, after a long accomplished life: an organizer and fighter, a rabble rouser and a hero right to the end, still vigorous, still healthy, now being celebrated as Jodie’s “Citizen of the Century.” But she never married, and now she lives alone.

Giving uip on the past, George travels to Jodie one more time, and finds Sadie at the celebration, and asks her to dance:

In the street, couples are jitterbugging. A few of them are even trying to lindy- hop , but none of them can swing it the way Sadie and I could swing it, back in the day. Not even close.

She takes my hand like a woman in a dream. She is in a dream, and so am I. Like all sweet dreams it will be brief … but brevity makes sweetness, doesn’t it? Yes, I think so. Because when the time is gone you can never get it back.

Party lights hang over the street, yellow and red and green. Sadie stumbles over someone’s chair, but I’m ready for this and I catch her easily by the arm.

“Sorry, clumsy,” she says.

“You always were, Sadie. One of your more endearing traits.”

Before she can ask about that I slip my arm around her waist. She slips hers around mine, still looking up at me. The lights skate across her cheeks and shine in her eyes. We clasp hands, fingers folding together naturally, and for me the years fall away like a coat that’s too heavy and too tight. In that moment, I hope on thing above all others: that she was not too busy to find at least one good man …

She speaks in a voice almost too low to be heard over the music. But I hear her – I always did. “Who are you, George?”

“Someone you knew in another life, honey.”

Then the music takes us, the music rolls away the years and we dance.

And that’s where we leave them

So this is a time travel tale and a thriller and a superb piece of speculative fantasy, but most of all it’s a love story and the message it delivers this: you may not be able change the past without catastrophic results, but you can learn to live with it, and even live happily ever after … however short and uncertain ‘ever after’ might be.

That’s cold comfort on rainy autumn afternoon, but I’ll take it.

I suspect you’ll feel the same way.

The Accidental Contractor

2011-12-28T08:08:00.000-08:00

I know a number of people who boldly chose second careers and made a success out of it. My father-in-law walked away from a lucrative job in advertising, put the contents of his Connecticut house up for sale as his first inventory and launched himself into the antiques business on Nantucket, founding the beloved Island Attic Industries. One of my best friends quit his father’s cleaning business to start studying and teaching Aikido. An older man I know retired from his consulting firm to take up the theater. He lives in Canada and works steadily there, doing commercial work and acting on stage.

I admire them all. I wish I could be like them.

I didn’t choose my second career. It was thrust upon me against my will, and I only took it up because my first career had been a complete failure. My wife and I were living in Los Angeles in 1979, and she hated it there. “No matter how far you go you’re always in the middle of nowhere,” she complained. “People here think white wine is health food.”

We agreed to give my Hollywood writing career five years to take off; if it didn’t, we’d move to somewhere she wanted to live, which turned out to be Nantucket Massachusetts. By the time my career ticket expired she was expecting our first child, which upped the stakes drastically: she was determined not to raise a kid among the smog and the drive-by shootings.

I will never forget the sense of loss and despair I felt as we organized for the move. Driving from Logan airport to the south coast we passed through the dreary town of Westwood, Ma. … I had been living in Westwood California for five years and the contrast couldn’t have been more bleak if we were moving from Paris to Paris, Texas.

On Nantucket the only jobs available were in real estate, retail and the building trades. There was something soul-suckingly awful about the real estate business, all the greedy people and the boring parties and the half-lies (“You can barely see the dump from here and they never burn trash in the summer.”). Retail just didn’t pay a living wage. So I was hauling roof shingles up thirty foot ladders in February when the man who painted my in-laws’ house offered me a job. ‘It’s indoors, there’s bathroom and it pays two dollars more an hour,” he told me.

I took it.

It soon turned out that I had no aptitude for it at all. I couldn’t set a nail without ruining the board it was driven into, I hammered ‘like a cobbler’ – a dire insult, take my word for it. I couldn't push a roller without tracking little raised lines of paint, or brush a surface without missing parts, usually near the edge. I couldn’t sand a surface smooth or spread joint compound on it without making a lumpy mess. I earned the amused nickname “human dropcloth” and for a while it seemed I could get paint anywhere but on the surface I was aiming for. I knocked over buckets of paint, and broke windows with ladders. I couldn’t cut straight line with a brush. If I tried to reglaze a window I broke the glass; if I tried to paint a window I painted the glass. My one virtue was that I showed up. And I was willing to admit that I knew nothing.

And I did show up, for ten hour days, six and seven days a week, literally hating every minute of it. If you had told me this was going to be my career, I would have laughed at you. If I believed it I would probably have start swigging the paint thinner.

While I toiled away breathing paint fumes and fuming about the injustice of life, my best friend was living in Los Angeles, rising through the ranks of a high-powered internet company. He drove a stylish used Mercedes coupe; I drove the company paint van. I went out there and stayed with him when I managed to finagle a writing gig, and saw his glamorous life at first hand. I kept thinking that one of my little screenwriting jobs would get me back out west permanently. Once I got a ‘development deal’ with a major TV producer – it secured my membership in the Writer’s Guild and it looked like I might finally hit escape velocity. But the producer fired me … failed to ‘pick up’ my option, and few months later I was back sanding a floor, feeling like the poor sap in the Coast Guard brig who found he couldn’t swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco after all. Disgruntled workers even referred to Nantucket as “The Rock.” It seemed grimly appropriate.

One day in particular comes to mind. I was running the big ‘floor walker’ machines over an old floor, trying to strip many layers of paint. There were so many layers in fact that the nail heads in the floor boards were buried and invisible. I had to use 16-grit paper, which was almost impossible to wrap tightly around the sanding drum, and since it looked like sharp pebbles on fly-paper my fingers were soon scraped raw. So that was the routine: ten minutes to tighten the paper on the drum, start the machine then BA RAP-RAP-RAP-RAP-RAP as the drum hit one of those hidden nails and the paper shredded. Start again, rinse and repeat, all day long. I began to think I was being punished but I didn’t know for what. Hubris, perhaps. I had been pretty cocky in L.A. taking my meetings and making my phone calls, in the balmy days when ‘coverage’ meant a script report not the amount of paint you could roll on a wall.

But things changed. I started to get good at the job. I learned new skills. I learned them slowly, haltingly, through some trial but mostly just error … but I learned. I figured out how to brush those first strokes across the board and follow up with the grain so that the edges got painted; I learned how to load my brush enough to let the paint draw the straight line between the wall and the ceiling. And after working on a giant old house on the harbor with sixty windows – 120 sash, twelve-over-twelves, more than 1,300 panes of glass altogether, most of them cracked or broken – I figured out how to glaze windows. Anyone could learn how to do it after doing it 1300 times – even me.

Eventually I went out on my own into the scary world of finding customers and bidding jobs and paying crews while trying to keep my self from going broke. Bid too much nd you don’t get the job; bid too little and it ruins you. One kindly contractor refused my first bid, saying ‘This is way low. You’ll get halfway through the job, realize you’re losing money and either bail or start fucking up. Go home and figure out what it’s really going to cost.” So I did After a while I found I was working less and making more money, tackling interesting renovation jobs surrounded by friends I’d known for years. Knowing how to glaze windows came in handy.

Being my own boss was scary (“I have no work for winter!” and then three days and four phone calls later, “I have too much work for the winter!”) but there was something satisfying about taking a job from start to finish, beginning with a peeling old ruin and ending up with something beautiful. Last year, an acquaintance walked past exterior I had just finished on Main Street, and said “It’s a jewel box!’

Meanwhile my friend was struggling as the internet bubble burst and he had to admit, as he watched people getting laid off and fired all around him, that he really didn’t know what his job consisted of. Selling band width, modifying phone plan contracts, meeting with people to discuss modification of previously existing protocols … or something. He sat in a cubicle and pushed paper and crunched numbers and never saw the beginning or the end of any project or plan. My job was starting to look pretty good, by comparison. I gradually developed an amazing group of fascinating customers who loved their houses and were willing to spend a lot of money to make them nicer. Quite a few of them became my friends. All the people I worked with – the crazy plasterers and PhD candidate tile guys and poetry writing carpenters – had one thing in common. I would never had met them, never even crossed paths with them, if I had become the Hollywood hot-shot I had dreamed about. And that would have been a pity.

None of this meant I stopped writing. I got an MFA working at home with two ten day residencies every year, I wrote a memoir and five novels (I’m working the sixth right now) as well as hundreds of blog posts, all between the hours of five and seven in the morning. I also managed to raise two kids and start surfing again. One summer I surfed too much and almost lost some customers, but it was my choice, and I still smile when I think of the day I’d called the General Contractor to tell him I’d be staying home “catching up on my paperwork.” He saw me ten minutes later, driving to the beach in my wetsuit.

The writing comes in handy on the job, too. We have many foreign painters on the island now, from Eastern Europe and South America and most places in between. It’s the most diverse crowd of workers Nantucket has attracted since the whaling days. They work hard but often their English is rusty and their writing skills nonexistent. I wonder how some of them would have handled the customer whose roofs I power-washed this fall. It was tricky because I couldn’t work on the front roof that faces the street. It was just too dangerous. I broke the news to her when I gave her the bill. Here’s our e-mail exchange:

Subject: Re: Roofs
Were you able to clean the front roof at all? I don't quite understand why this was more challenging than the back side of the roof, which has the same pitch. Obviously, the front side is the most visible part of the entire roof, so the fact that this was the only surface not cleaned is quite disappointing. I understand that you took great pains to figure out how to get to it, but why is this different from any other house whose roof you've cleaned?

To which I replied, honestly feeling like the final payment might be at stake:

I wasn't going to go into the details but ...

Actually the front side is only really visible when you’re driving down the street .... but anyway ---

The roof's pitch was no the problem. Access and stability were the problem The roof is too long for the longest hook ladder to attach over the peak and extend down past the lower roof line. This means that access from below -- from the street, up another ladder -- requires actually climbing on the roof at an angle to get from one ladder to the other. This doesn't seem like such a circus feat until you're actually up there, dragging a power washer. I made the determination that it was too risky and looked to other tactics. Approaching the front from the back seemed good, there's a sort of 'staging area' up there, but there's this little hidden dormer, which makes setting ladder securely on that side of the roof impossible for about half of the length. You have to be able to get up that back-end rise with good footing in order to go over the peak and onto the hook ladder ... not ideal at the best best of times, but very treacherous when an obstacle prevents you from setting up the 'approach' ladder at the back of the roof. You have to remember, within minutes both sides of the roof are soaking wet and slick as glass.

Onto the next idea. A rope -- secured around the chimney. I bought the rope and the harness it would attach to. Ever try to get a leash-harness on your dog? This was like a Chinese puzzle by comparison, all random dangling straps. Still, I figured it out. What I had failed to figure out was that the rope, extending diagonally along the roof to either side, would drop me somewhere between the gutter and and bottom of the second story windows, if indeed the worst happened and it had to catch me at all. That leaves me dangling above the street trying to climb back and secure the power washer. I would leave that to a man with a healthier rotator cuff. I checked with several men younger and more daring than myself. The general consensus was "Get a cherry picker" People use them a lot now, I see them everywhere. Maybe in the Spring we could investigate the cost of that option.

I know you're disappointed. I am, too -- as well as frustrated, stymied and chagrined. Believe me, I was determined to do this -- and spent probably too much time trying to solve the problem. But I finally had to accept defeat -- this round, at least. When I had a question for Bruce Killen's carpenters in the old days, they used to shrug off my worries and say "We have the technology!" We have the technology here, too, to complete this part of this project safely and efficiently.

The pictures re attached.

In response I got the following, which made my day.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, and for your many attempts to make it work.

The photos look great. I'll have the balance mailed to you shortly.

Thanks.

I honestly think I’ll be paid on this job not just for doing the work, but for being able to tell the story of the work I didn’t do.

So here I am, twenty six years later, kids all grown, still painting, still writing, still climbing around on roofs, renovating old houses and actually enjoying myself. I’m independent, even if I do have to grovel and tap-dance from time to time. And I find that I enjoy improving things, even if it’s only old houses. They have personalities for me, above and beyond whatever I may think of their owners. I love them the way you might love a pet; I sometimes feel like I’m grooming an immense placid animal when I’m working on those gorgeous exteriors. I like melting away layer after layer of old coatings (lead, calcimite, oil and latex) to show some lovely detail that’s been smothered under all that paint for a generation. I like the camaraderie of sharing a late night bottle of wine as we finish the trim work ahead of the floor guys or the furniture movers.

As for my friend? The internet company he worked for folded and he’s scrambling now, looking for his own second career. Just as well.

I hope he finds something as unexpected and rewarding as I did.

Parenting for Beginners

2011-12-28T08:06:00.000-08:00

When my wife was pregnant with our first child, we started reading the baby books.

The world seemed to be entirely populated with experts on child rearing, and the clamor of their contradictory advice left us stunned and bewildered. Breastfeeding was good; and bad. It should stop at six months, or continue through grade school. Children should sleep with their parents; and sharing a bed would warp them forever. Or actually it really didn’t matter either way. What mattered was when you began toilet training which should be as soon as possible, and put off as long as you could and every concept of timing in between. Cloth diapers were essential; disposal ones were the only way to go. The whole idea of diapers was constrictive and reactionary. Parents should be permissive and strict, corporal punishment was crucial and cruel. Dr. Spock said “Never hit a child in anger.” But the idea of doing it calmly, in accordance with some steely cold blooded disciplinary master plan felt really crazy to us.

Our pediatrician just shrugged. “Make it up as you go along,” he said. “That’s what everyone else does.”

Cold comfort: we had little faith in our deracinated modern ‘instincts’, and scant belief that we could make the right decision in the clutch.

But we did. I guess we did, we must have, if the kids are anything to judge by. They turned out great, and I say that with no preening parental pride. Our greatest accomplishment was not screwing them up. Somehow we managed that. But I’ve seen great young people emerge from abusive, neglectful or just insanely chaotic households, so what’s up with that? Maybe the whole idea of parenting properly is a kind of publishing scam, and nurture will always lose the “nature-nurture” debate. The kids blessed with good genes will prosper in any family, while the ones born weak or damaged will fail, despite the best efforts of the best-read and best intentioned Mom and Dad.

That being said, I think it’s worthwhile, taking a look at some of the ways in which we managed not to screw up our kids. It’s setting the bar low, but it will probably be no more confusing for new parents than the welter of contentious advice we struggled with back in the late summer and fall of 1983. I can’t say that our way is the only way to raise children, or even the best way. I only know it worked for us, and even on paper it seems to make sense. There’s a sort of simple minded logic to it, and simplicity is even better than logic when you have a screaming baby to deal with at midnight, and a job to wake up for the next morning.

I suppose you could say it boils down to ‘going with the flow’, and staying alert enough to understand what the flow is and which way it’s flowing. Breast feeding? The system is already in place. It works pretty well, why fight it? Toilet training? Kids let you know when they get interested in the potty. Help them stick with it, make them feel good about it. Kids want to grow up. Stay out of the way when you can and cheer them on. B.F. Skinner proved more than sixty years ago that praise works better than punishment. He trained pigeons to play ping-pong with what he called ‘operant conditioning’, a purely rewards-based system.

Which is not to advocate the creepy praise-for-everything culture I see around us now, with trophies that say “Participant”, and giddy applause for everything a child does. There are real challenges and real failures lurking out there. My Mom helped me with my French subjunctives; I edited my kids’ English papers. They learned the basics of good writing early. They even knew that ‘writing’ was a gerund in that last sentence. Teaching my son to read was an uphill struggle. He just wasn’t interested. The school said he was dumb, which I knew he wasn’t. They said he had ADD, which I knew he didn’t because he was perfectly capable of concentrating on stuff he was interested in, like the workings of my car. The first book he ever read through all the way by himself was the owner’s manual of my Ford Festiva. Giving it to him feels like inspiration looking back; it felt more like desperation at the time. But it worked. Next step: Robert B. Parker … and from it was a quick jump to Hunter B. Thompson and Robert A. Caro. One Christmas I gave him a subscription to Maxim magazine; the next Christmas all he wanted was a massive textbook for studying Arabic. And I wasn’t even surprised.

Caity knew that she wanted to help people as a life’s work when she was still in High School. That wasn’t my idea or her Mom’s, we didn’t artfully guide her toward a career in social work. We just watched. We watched as she took over the Peers Promoting Aids Awareness organization at the school; we watched as she cut and pasted an essay she’d written for the group into her early admission application to Wheelock; watched as she got in and did brilliantly and we watched as she graduated in the rain, four years later. Our part? Not being gratuitously discouraging or expecting her do something else like go to law school or marry some rich guy. All we had to do was attend every chorus concert and high school musical (She was a tree in the Wizard of OZ), keep her fed and well-rested, take a seat and watch.

So what about discipline? They must have acted not and gotten into trouble now and then. Of course they did. But we never spanked anyone or grounded anyone, or even yelled. It’s not necessary. We didn’t have many rules and the ones we did enforce – mostly concerning sanitation and courtesy – made sense even to an eight year old. And when things got out of hand the punishment didn’t just “fit the crime” it was a function of the crime, the logical extension of the crime. That is, if kids are fighting the car, I can’t drive the car. So the car stops. The fact that sitting in a stationary car is something close to a working definition of Hell for most kids was convenient propinquity. The first time they started screaming and crying in a restaurant, we just left … as dinner was being brought to the table. I had to pay for a meal we didn’t eat but the stunned looks on their faces (I had called their bluff… over food) told the whole story: we can’t eat in a restaurant with screaming children, so we don’t. We never had a problem eating out again.

When I was growing up parents were terrified of what my Mom called the ‘evil companion’ syndrome: their kids falling in with the “wrong crowd”, turning to promiscuity and drugs under the influence of some glamorous Svengali. My Mom never worried about that stuff; and when I became a parent, I didn’t either. She trusted her kids and so I trusted mine. I think that basic faith in the essential level-headed goodness of your children, is the ultimate secret to not screwing them up. If your son is secure and happy, he won’t plunge into some self-destructive spiral of drug addiction (though they may experiment with pot just like you did); if your daughter doesn’t have any ‘father issues’ she won’t fall victim to the predators that prey on girls who do. If you’re really there for your kids, giving them quantity time and not just ‘quality time’, they’ll know it. Between the ages of roughly eight and thirteen, I was my son’s primary companion and best friend (the kind of best friend who makes you brush your teeth and clean your room). He was socially isolated, with only one pal at school, but I wasn’t worried about him. He just was ahead of the curve; no one else got his jokes. But he knew he was funny because he kept me laughing, and he knew he was smart because I’d stay up until two in the morning with him (on a school night!) after a read-aloud session from 1984 that had been intended to lull him to sleep, discussing the theory and practice of oligarchical collectivism. Somewhere around the tenth grade, everyone else caught up and he was suddenly one of the most popular kids in school. I used the capital I’d accumulated in those years to push him about college. I was relentless and he was reluctant. Finally he worked with me for a year, humping ladders and pushing paint. That convinced him, even though he had to struggle through a stint at community college before he could begin at UMass.

Now he’s in DC doing fund raising for Democratic candidates; Caity is in Boston working with HIV positive homeless people, and I’m still watching them, wondering what we did right. And the memory pops up: teaching Caity to ride her bike. The rules were the same: keep up, but run behind them, hands off, but ready to steady them if they start to fall, offer sensible encouragement and then take one quick breath when they ride that bike around the corner, out of sight and gone.

The baby books didn’t tell me that. I wish they had. Learning it myself took twenty years.

My Paul Simon Collection

2011-12-28T08:04:00.000-08:00

Much as I admire Paul Simon, I’m sick to death of his Greatest Hits collections. They’re relentless. Only the Mamas and the Papas (It seemed like they had one album and dozens of Greatest Hits albums) impose on our admiration and exploit our ‘completionist’ fan- boy hoarding pathologies with such mercenary gusto. An upcoming boxed ‘collectors’ edition of Graceland, four concert records, a three disc career retrospective box set, and at least three other greatest hits discs, so far … or should I say four of them, since yet another one is going to be released on October 24th.

The worst part of this retread parade is their redundancy. Many of the same songs appear on every collection, from one-of-a-kind masterpieces like Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes to forgettable misfires like Darling Lorraine (off the largely forgettable You’re the One album), for which Simon holds a stubborn affection. Apart from feeling vaguely ripped off buying the same set of songs for the third or fourth or fifth time (not counting all the changing formats – from vinyl and eight-track to cassette to CD to digital download), the worst part of the ritual is that it creates the inexcusable illusion that Simon really hasn’t written that many songs worth anthologizing. Even a recent tribute concert, which began with high-flown speeches praising 40 years of consistent songwriting pretty much ignored everything he’s done since 1986.

But I’m not here just to complain. Whenever I attend a Paul Simon concert it occurs to me that he could have done a completely different set of songs with no loss of quality. The same is true for these endless re-packaging efforts. So, on the eve of the latest redundant reissue (This one is called Songwriter) I’ve decided to offer my DIY compilation. Fifteen minutes on iTunes and you can turn my list into the most unusual and worthwhile anthology of them all. I’ve chosen songs that Paul Simon never sings in concert, songs that have never appeared on any “hits” or ”best of” album, or retrospective. But they’re just as good or better than most of the songs you hear over and over again, in concert after concert , record after record.

Here’s the play list of the new compilation:

Paul Simon - Songwriter
Disc 1
1. The Sound Of Silence (Live at Webster Hall 2011) - new unreleased
2. The Boxer - Paul Simon - Live Central Park
3. Bridge Over Troubled Water - Aretha Franklin - studio version
4. Mother And Child Reunion
5. Tenderness
6. Peace Like A River
7. American Tune
8. Kodachrome
9. Something So Right
10. Late In The Evening
11. Train In The Distance
12. Hearts And Bones
13. Rene And Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War
14.Still Crazy After All These Years
15. Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes
16. The Boy In The Bubble
17. Graceland
Disc 2
1. Obvious Child
2. Further To Fly
3. The Cool, Cool River
4. Spirit Voices
5. Born In Puerto Rico
6. Quality
7. Darling Lorraine
8. Look At That
9. Senorita With A Necklace Of Tears
10. That's Me
11. Another Galaxy
12. Father And Daughter
13. Rewrite
14. Love And Hard Times
15. So Beautiful Or So What

And here’s my playlist, with notes

Disc 1

Bleecker Street,

A haunting early ballad, with that young Paul Simon combination of sublime melody, lovely acoustic guitar playing, elegant harmonies … and stunningly pretentious lyrics. Hey, he was twenty. Read your own diaries (or poems) from that era of your own life. Even so, some of the lines work: ‘Voices leaking from a sad café/smiling faces try to understand/I saw a shadow touch a shadow’s hand/ On Bleecker Street”

Song for the Asking

This modest offering from the Bridge Over Troubled Water album, is at least as tuneful as The Only Living Boy in New York ,say (that favorite of car advertisers and indie film-makers), or the title tune, which has been ubiquitous for more than four decades. The deft interior rhyme shows a lyric writer growing up: “This is my song for the asking/Ask me and I will play/So sweetly I’ll make you smile.”

At The Zoo

From the same Multi-platinun Simon and Garfunkel swan song record, this ditty was originally composed for The Graduate. Like much of the music Simon wrote for that film, Mike Nichols rejected it. He was shooting on location at the San Francisco zoo. Lyrics like “It’s a light and tumble journey from the east side to the Park” seemed perversely uncooperative. Paul does annoy people. But the song is lilting and lovely. And charming in its fanciful thumbnail portraits of the animals:” The monkeys stand for honesty/Giraffes are insincere/And the elephants are kindly but they're dumb./Orangutans are skeptical/Of changes in their cages … Zebras are reactionaries,Antelopes are missionaries/Pigeons plot in secrecy/And hamsters turn on frequently…”

Everything Put Together Falls Apart

This tune from the self-titled solo album that appeared in the wake of the big Simon and Garfunkel meltdown, is another secret masterpiece. After the lush orchestrations forced on him by his partner and his record producer (“I’ve been Roy Hallee-d and Art Garfunkled,”as he wrote in his Sullen Desultory Philippic, a few years before), this collection of songs was much simpler, with a live feel. And you can see the lyrics maturing: “Taking downs/To get off to sleep/and ups to start you on your way/After a while/They’ll change your style/I see it happening every day.”

Congratulations

This song, a bittersweet meditation on divorce, closes out the album with a mournful electric piano solo. The bridge warns us: “Love is not game/love is not a toy/Love’s no romance/Love will do you in/ Love will knock you out/ And needless to say/You won’t stand a chance, you won’t stand a chance.” It ends with this plaintive question most of us are still asking: “I’m hungry for Learning/Won’t you answer me please/Can a man and a woman/ Live together in peace?”

Learn How to Fall

Another lost classic, this one on the superlative There Goes Rhymin’ Simon album, from 1974. Who else would spin a dry meteorologist’s phrase like “prevailing winds” into a line like this :”You’ve got to drift in the breeze, before you set your sails/It’s an occupation where the win prevails.” Simon’s hard-working word-play always has a serious point to make.

St. Judy’s Comet

This is the famously ineffective lullaby that never got Harper Simon to sleep. “I sang it once, I sang it twice/I’m gonna sing it three time more/Gonna sing till your resistance is overcome/Cause if I can’t sing my boy to sleep/it makes your famous daddy look so dumb. Look so dumb.” I don’t know … it worked for my kids, I don’t even sing that well.

Tenderness

Backed by The Dixie Humming Birds, its plaintive “You say you care for me/But there’s no tenderness/beneath your honesty” strikes an unusual note in the cool, detached cannon of Simon tunes, where emotion is generally approached sideways. They say Simon fired the whole Capeman orchestra because they weren’t ‘musical enough’ I’m sure he had no such problems with his gospel back-up singers here. The doo-wop harmonies are gorgeous.

My Little Town

This dark little tale, which either concerns a mass murderer or (more likely) someone who just fantasizes about it, was written both as a duet for Simon and Garfunkel and, since it was going to appear on both of their solo albums, a bitter tonic for the chronic sweetness of his erstwhile partner’s solo work. With harsh lyrics inspired by British poet Ted Hughes (“And after it rains/there’s a rainbow/ and all of the colors are black/it’s not that the colors aren’t there/it’s just imagination they lack”), Simon soon comes to the ambivalent but alarming point “In my little town/I never meant nothing, I was just my father’s son/saving my money, dreaming of glory/ twitching like a finger on the trigger of a gun/leaving nothing but the dead and the dying/back in my little town.” With its haunting one-finger piano intro and another dose of the finely-wrought harmonies his fans had been missing, this song is a keeper.

Some Folk’s Lives Roll Easy

This rueful tune’s obscurity can be explained by its complicated melody – nothing you’d sing in the shower; and its downbeat message. Yet it is redeemed (like many Simon songs, notably The Cool Cool River on the official CD) by the bridge, which firms into a much more sing-able tune and one of Simon’s better lyrics, full of self aware, ironic desperation: “Here I am Lord/I’m knocking at your place of business/And I know I aint got no business here/But you said if I ever got so low I was busted/ You could be trusted.”

Oh,Marion

Simon’s One Trick Pony album never got the success or the praise it deserved, possibly because there was a fair amount of filler on the record (Long, Long Day, God Bless the Absentee), and possibly because(Like The Capeman) it came yoked to another project in another field. The movie One Trick Pony had quite a few problems, but the primary one was asking the audience to accept Paul Simon’s character as a washed-up loser. There was an off-putting reverse vanity about that idea, exacerbated by the fact that Simon wasn’t a particularly good actor. Still, most of the songs were good and deserve a chance to be heard. This tune combines the chilly oblique side of the artist (“The boy has a voice but his voice is his natural disguise/Yeah the boy has a voice but his words don’t connect to his eyes”) with a more frank and open confessional voice: “Oh Marion, I should have believed you when I heard you saying it/the only time love is an easy game/ is when two other people are playing it.” The mental dissonance makes for a memorable song.

Ace in the Hole

The obscurity of this cut remains a mystery. It’s an up-tempo rocker with a lovely bridge. Maybe the slighting reference to Jesus (“Some people say Jesus is their ace in the hole/I’ve never met the man so I don’t really know”) put people off. Or the reference to cocaine (”Two hundred dollars is the price on the street”).

Too bad because it has some of Simon’s most beautiful writing, with lines like “In the hour when the heart is weakest/And memory is strong.” From the bus-riding middle-eight.

Nobody

This final orphan from the 1980 film sound track is a mournful little tune, celebrating a loved one and subtly invoking the end of the relationship: “Who knows my secret broken bone/Who feels my flesh when I am gone/Who was a witness to the dream/Who kissed my eyes and saw the scream/Lying there/
Nobody/.” Later he adds “Nobody but you,” yet it feels like an elegiac afterthought. Not a rouser, not a toe-tapper; it’s a dirge, really. But a haunting one

Think Too Much (a & b)

These were going to be the title tracks of a Simon and Garfunkel ‘come back’ album, in 1983, with the sly joke hardwired into the name: “Simon and Garfunkel think too much.” Well, at least one of them does. And his thinking around that time was that his erstwhile partner was a resentful lazy arrogant diva who couldn’t be bothered to write his own harmony parts or even show up for rehearsals. So Simon fired Garfunkel, stripped his vocals off all the tracks, and Think Too Much became Hearts and Bones and promptly tanked with a million disappointed fans. Too bad because it was good record and could have been a hit. All Simon ever trots out for the re-packagers are the new title track -- and Train in the Distance, admittedly one of the greats. But the old title track has a lot to be said for it. The fact that Simon wrote two songs about thinking too much is a wry commentary on the process, and the songs chastise the over-worked ‘left side of the brain’. He asks at one point “Have you ever experienced a period of grace/When your brain just takes a seat behind your face?” and concludes with a vision of his departed father holding Paul to his chest, saying “There’s not much more that you can do/Go on and get some rest.”

Song About the Moon

I love this abstract ditty about making art (Yes, he does think too much, deal with it). His consultation moves from the wittily oblique “If you want to write a song about the moon/walk along the craters of the afternoon” to the bizarrely prescriptive “Wash your hands in dreams and lighting/Cut off your hair and whatever is frightening”, finally coming down to earth, saying “If you want to write a song about a face/ Think bout a photograph/That you really can’t remember but you can’t erase.” In the end he’s bluntly exasperated: “If you want to write a song about face/If you want to write a song about the human race/ Then do it/Write a song about the moon.” . There are fifty ways to leave your lover or write a song and it all comes down to one: just do it. Tough medicine, with a shuffle beat.

Disk Two

Gumboots

Graceland was such a tremendous achievement that it has become a generic term – at least among my friends. It means, the best work. Atonement was Ian McEwan’s Graceland; West Side Story was Leonard Bernstein’s; Guernica was Picasso’s. Think of an artist – you’ll figure out their Graceland instantly. Tom Wolfe? Bonfire of the Vanities. Dylan Thomas? Fern Hill. Arthur Miller? Death of a Salesman. There are no bad songs on Graceland, which makes it all the more frustrating the same three or four tunes get continuously recycled, leaving others to languish. Gumboots started as a track by the South African group, Boyoyo Boys, the title song of a bootleg CD that Simon was playing in his car during the career low-point after Hearts and Bones. It’s really where the Graceland album started: long drives where the defeated artist floated his own tune and lyrics over the propulsive South African beats, purely for his own pleasure. You can feel the improvisational lilt in the words: “I was walking down the street when I thought I heard a voice say/”Hey, aint we walking down the same street together on the same day?”/ I said, “Hey Senorita that’s astute/Why don’ we get together and call ourselves and institute?”

I Know What I Know

Another instant classic relegated to the B-side of some forgotten single. The jangling guitar and drum track set up another dose of ironic urban lyrics – the piquant cross-cultural dissonance that irked people most about the album when it first came out. “She moved so easily I could think of was sunlight/ I said ‘Aren’t you the woman who was recently given a Fulbright?’” People who railed on about Simon’s “exploiting” the Soweto musicians he worked with never talked to any of them. He gave them an international audience, full credit on the record … and some of the first (and certainly the biggest) pay checks of their lives, when the royalties started coming in. Joseph Shabalala put it best: “Everybody loves Paul Simon.”

All Around the World, or the myth of Fingerprints

This is the final song on the record, an upbeat rave that indirectly answers the critics of Graceland’s global music experiment: “He said there’s no doubt about it/It was the myth of fingerprints/I’ve seen them all and man they’re all the same.”

Proof

The Rhythm of the Saints also holds a ‘generic term’ status for me: the iconic second best effort. If Catch-22 was Joseph Heller’s Graceland, the Something Happened was his Rhythm of the Saints. Schindler’s List was Spielberg’s Graceland; Saving Private Ryan was his Rhythm of the Saints. Pat Conroy? The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. T.S Eliot? Prufrock and Four Quartets. Arthur Miller? Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. It goes on and on. Pick an artist you like; you’ll see the pattern emerge. Even with Tolstoy! Though opinions differ and I think he’d be irked to know that War and Peace is his Rhythm of the Saints. Anyway … Proof is a great song, cannibalized in later (lesser) efforts, like Darling Lorraine. Check out the original.

The Coast

This is arguably the greatest song on a fine record, a cryptic masterpiece whose melodies and harmonies stay with you like the smell of old summer houses or your mother’s handwriting on a forgotten envelope. It’s about music and art and the life of the artist, and the death of the planet and love and loss and pretty much everything else you can think of. Another sublime omission.

She Moves On

This song has won some later renown through Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking; it was written about her and her short-lived marriage to Paul Simon. She’s funny about it; and him. But the song transcends its gossipy roots, with its intricate drum figures and troubling minor-key variations. It’s actually kind of a difficult piece, and no kind of hit (greatest or otherwise); but well worth the effort.

Trailways Bus

Almost ten years passed between Rhythm of the Saints and The Capeman. Once again, Simon got involved in an extra-curricular project – in this case a Broadway show about a Puerto Rican gang member convicted of murder in 1950s New York. He wrote the lyrics with poet Derek Walcott, which was probably a mistake. But the music is all Paul Simon – unlike Graceland—and its mixture of salsa and doo-wop is unique and wonderful. The show flopped for a lot of reasons. I actually got a bootleg of the whole cast album, and most what Simon left off the official record sounded like filler to me; sorry. Simon tried to tell the whole story in songs, which is fine for an oratorio – but he left no space for a libretto, and nothing for actors to do. So it felt stilted and dull on stage. It was recently revived, both at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and (later) at the Delacorte. Both times it was treated as a play for voices, a song cycle … and it did quite well. Even the sternly exigent Ben Brantley at The New York Times had to admit the piece worked when performed in on the shore of Belvedere Pond. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/theater/18capeman.html?_r=1

Lines like “When the leaves are dark/I have a hiding place in Central Park” (From Bernadette, see below) must have seemed magical in that setting. Trailways Bus harks back to the lovely bridge of Ace in the Hole (“Riding on this rolling bus/ Beneath the stony sky”) and even further back, to the great American Tune. Buses inspire Simon and this road story of an ex-convict’s long ride west to meet his prison pen pal, takes an angry – and timely -- turn when the bus is rousted by immigration officials. It’s a mournful ballad, but the gentle pulse of the acoustic guitar seems to be driving the wheels and the poignant snapshots of life on the road make this forgotten episode in a lost man’s life stirringly vivid. It’s a keeper.

Bernadette

This single was the first thing I heard from The Capeman, and it gave me hope. This is a love song in Salvatore Agron’s voice, before all the murder and the jail time. It’s innocent, buoyant, beautiful. “Though my words may be jumbled/I’m telling you just how it feels.” The song if full of hope and the hope is laced with bitter irony. But the dark edges keep it memorable.

The Vampires

This brooding song from The Capeman, with its harsh lyrics and its pounding latino beat, sets the mood for the rest of the play. The concussive piano seems to exult in the mean streak of this “spic you scrubbed off the sidewalk”, as Agron refers to himself in the stunning album highlight, Adios Hermanos -- occasionally re-packaged, and thus disqualified from our list.

The gang leader sings the song to Sal. Here he is talking about their hideout:

This is the cave of The Vampires,/Count Dracula's castle,/The very sight could turn a white man grey./Made in the shade, use my umbrella/Black like the night we fly in./That blade is all you need to keep the dogs away.”

The recurrent themes: “We stand for the neighborhood” and more to the point: “If you got the balls, then come on mete mano.” Draw the battle lines clearly. This song is a dangerous object; it feels like a switchblade in your hand. It also boasts one of my all-time favorite lyrics, describing a big Irish gang-member coming out into the street to defend his mother: “Then along comes the son/He looks like a ton/of corned beef floating in beer.”

That’s Where I Belong

There wasn’t a lot to get excited about in Paul Simon’s 2000 album You’re the One. It seemed to be mostly filler, but a few songs stand out and That’s Where I Belong is the best of them. It’s one of those rock n roll declarations, music about making music, and it has a noble ancestry, dating back to Chuck Berry’s Rock and Roll Music though Juluka’s “Mquanga Man” and even Billy Joel’s Baby Grand. The first lines say it all: “Somewhere, in a burst of glory/sound becomes a song/I’m bound to tell a story/That’s where I belong.” Aint it the truth, Paul. Aint it the truth.

Old

This song pounds out a repeated riff, one of Simon’s favorite rave-up techniques, and it goes back through his musical roots to kickstart his auto- biography in a couple of lines:

The first time I heard “Peggy Sue”/I was twelve years old/Russians up in rocket ships/And the war was cold/Now many wars have come and gone/Buddy Holly still goes on/but his catalog was sold.” The song segues into the metaphysical soon after that, but it never loses its sense of humor.

Everything About it is a Love Song

Surprise, released in 2005, began a resurgence that continues through the present day, with Simon’s new record, So Beautiful or So What. A unique collaboration with long-time David Byrne cohort Brian Eno, the album, though not perfect, marked a radical improvement from You’re The One. The only two songs that from this fascinating album that Simon seems willing to repackage are Father and Daughter, a sentimental trifle; and Wartime Prayers, an uneven effort that rises to a kind of lush majesty in its stirring bridge section, before dwindling back to lifeless somnolence as it dwindles to its conclusion. Too bad – there’s part of a great song there. By contrast, Everything About it is a Love Song is a fully realized minor masterpiece.

I can’t play you the tune, but listen to these lyrics: “Early December, and brown as a sparrow/Frost creeping over the pond/I shoot a thought into the future, and it flies like an arrow/Through my lifetime, and beyond/If I ever come back as a tree, or a crow/Or even the windblown dust/Find me on the ancient road/In the song when the wires are hushed/Hurry on and remember me, as I’ll remember you/Far above the golden clouds, the darkness vibrates/
The earth is blue/And everything about it is a love song.”

Outrageous

Paul Simon once remarked that he was always surprised by which songs became hits. That always struck me as disingenuous – hello, it’s the up-tempo ones, Paul. That’s why Graceland was your biggest seller: it’s all up-tempo songs. By the dame token, it seemed to me that Outrageous was the obvious hit from the Surprise album. But it tackles the subject of ageing, and with its repeated question ‘Who’s gonna love you when your looks are gone?” it might have put people off. The song fits into a long tradition in Simon’s song writing – the self amused rant – that stretches back as far as A Sullen Desultory Phillipic from the Simon and Garfunkel days, and Have a Good Time, from Still Crazy After All These Years. It’s sprightly fun, with faint overlay of easy-going religiosity, and it deserves a wider audience.

Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean

This is one of my favorite Paul Simon songs ever, alternating sweet melodic lines with a pulsing machine-like Brian Eno electronic beat that snaps you to attention. It tells the story of a man staring his life over, but ultimately being unable to escape his past. A whole novel boiled down to three verses and a clear thematic bridge: “Once upon a time there was an ocean/Now there’s a mountain range/Something unstoppable set into motion/Nothing is different but everything has changed.” This is a song you’ll listen to occasionally – forever.

Dazzling Blue

This is my favorite song from the new record, and I was happy to hear him perform it in concert this spring. It’s a straight-ahead love story, with second act reverse (Miles apart/Though the miles can’t measure distance/Worlds apart/On a rainy afternoon”). The song is autobiographical, a bouquet for his wife, and the final verse is a knockout, going all the way back to their beginning: “Sweet July/And we drove the Montauk highway/and walked along the cliffs above the sea/And we wondered why, and imagined it was someday/And that is how the future came to be.”

The music feels a little like Graceland, with an African spark in the track, and it sticks with you. I find myself singing it at odd times – driving, or thirty-five feet up a ladder on a windy day – just because the music feels so good.

The Afterlife

Finally, the song about what happens after you die. Turns out, you fill out a form and wait on line, just like life -- and the DMV. The irrepressible shuffle beat pulls you toward the final revelation in this dream, and it turns out to be – no surprise -- the ultimate celebration of rock and roll: “When you climb the ladder of time/And the Lord God is near/Face to face in the vastness of space/And your words disappear/And you feel like you’re swimming in an ocean of love, and current strong/But all that remains when you try to explain is fragment of song/ Lord, is it Be Bop a Lula? Or ooh Papa Doo?” Maybe Paul McCartney had glimpsed god when he woke up with the tune of Yesterday in his head. I can believe it.

Well, that’s the record, and just a few days late for Paul’s 70th birthday. It’s no better than the one they’re releasing on October 24th, but it’s a little more interesting and a lot more fun.

Download it and see for yourself.

We're the Punchline: The Real Meaning of a Joke

2011-12-28T08:03:00.000-08:00

When I first heard the joke ,years ago, I thought the subtext was something about American ingenuity, and the good natured P.T. Barnum con-men who gave America its lively carnival atmosphere – greed tempered with mischief and a devilish wink of the eye.

Now I know better.

Here’s the joke:

A man walks into a bar. He says to the bartender. I’ll bet you fifty dollars I can bite my own eye. Well, the bartender knows that’s impossible -- an easy fifty bucks. He puts the money on the bar and the man takes out his glass eye, bites it and puts it back. Then he says: I’ll bet you a hundred bucks I can bite my other eye. Well, no one has two glass eyes. Hoping to cancel his losses and double his original bet, the bartender slaps the money down. The man takes out his false teeth and bites his other eye. The bartender is furious. But the man offers him one last bet. “I’ll wager five hundred dollars that I can slide this shot glass all the way along the countertop here, and run beside it, pissing into it – and not get one drop on your bar!” Easy money: that IS impossible. So the man strips down and slides the glass and takes off. He pisses all over the bar. The bartender can’t help himself, he lets out a whoop of victory. But the man at the other end of the bar isn’t so happy. “God damn it!” he snarls. “What’s the matter, buddy?” the bartender asks. “What’s the matter?! This guy just bet me a thousand dollars that he could piss all over your bar and you’d be happy about it!”

Now I finally understand this joke. It isn’t about the good natured prankster and the rubes tricked out of the big tent by the words THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, thinking it was some new kind of bird.

No this joke is in fact the story of American capitalism today. Set it to music and it could be the marching song of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The con-man is a prototype of all the hedge-fund swindlers and Ponzi schemers, the dot com dodgers and credit default swap dealers.

The bartender is you and me, average Americans betting on common sense, expecting reasonable outcomes, and perhaps also the tea-party dupe, cheering on as his business is vandalized.

The guy the other end of the bar is the investor, the bubble-dude, the my-house-is-an ATM sucker, betting on a ‘sure thing’, always outsmarted by the Madoff mandarins of wall street. It’s a good laugh.

But the joke is on us.

"The Phantom Tollbooth" at 50

2011-12-28T08:00:00.000-08:00

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth (with illustrations by Jules Feiffer). In honor of that milestone, Random House has put out a new edition, complete with essays by various notable fans on what the book meant to them, growing up. I was not asked to participate. Nether were a lot of other admirers of around my age, so perhaps I speak for some of them when I try to explain why I love this book so much.

I tried to tell the author – he was teaching architecture at Hampshire College in 1973, when I was attending the school. I hunted him down in his office at the Cole Science Center like a spaniel splashing after a downed greenhead duck. By that time the professor was tired of the hunt, though. He informed me in a cantankerous growl that he absolutely no desire to talk about ‘that book’ to anyone, ever again.

Too bad. I had a lot to say.

The book tells the story of a bored little boy named Milo:

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be back in. On the way he thought about coming home,and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered … “It seems to me that almost everything is a waste of time,” he remarked one day as he walked dejectedly home from school. “I can’t see the point of learning to solve useless problems, or subtracting turnips from turnips, or knowing where Ethiopia is, or how to spell February.” And since no one bothered to explain otherwise, he regarded the process of seeking knowledge as the greatest waste of time of all.

One day, Milo comes home to find an easily assembled toll booth and a working toy car sitting in his bedroom. With nothing better to do, he puts the toll booth together and drives through it … into ‘the lands beyond’, otherwise known as The Kingdom of Knowledge, a fabulous principality set up in every particular to refute and banish his boredom and indifference to the world around him. He winds up on a quest to save the twin Princesses Rhyme and reason from their captivity in the Mountains of ignorance, with a motley crew of friends and comrades in arms, including the “watch dog”, Tock, whose body is mostly composed of a loudly ticking antique watch, and a large impeccably dressed roach named the Humbug, who at one point, swims several miles in the Sea of Knowledge without getting wet.

I was nine when the book came out and I didn’t get a lot of this. I just like the adventure -- the Kingdom of words (Dictionopolis) and the Kingdom of numbers, (Digitopolis), the scary monsters in the mountains, the happy ending, the glorious scratchy drawings.

But I read the book again when I was twelve, and suddenly got some of the jokes. The ruler of Dictionopolis is King Azaz, the Unabridged; the foods at the feast include rigamaroles, ragamuffins, synonym buns, half-baked ideas…and of course just desserts. The royal vehicle “goes without saying” – that is, it only moves when everyone riding in is silent. In later readings I figured out that the fat dwarf policeman “Short Shrift” was another pun, that the flight across the water to the isle of conclusions was a jump, and it happened whenever you made an assumption based on too little information. The Point of View was not just as scenic overlook – it was a house where the fat man, the thin man the giant and the midget all lived together. Of course they were all the same average-sized man. To a giant, he seemed like a midget, to a fat man he seemed thin …

Each time I read the book – at thirteen, and fifteen, and nineteen – I got more of its sly jokes. I could almost chart my maturing sense of humor and my larger sense of the world around me by the layers of Juster’s story that opened up for me on subsequent readings. And the creatures in the mountains of ignorance, from the wordsnatcher (who takes the words right out of your mouth) to the terrible Trivium, the demon of petty tasks, to the Senses Taker who robs you not just of your senses of smell and taste but also your sense of purpose, proportion and duty, hut can’t steal your sense of humor, all meant much more to be as I got older.

And the final secret of Milo’s quest, the one thing that neither King would share with him, meant the most to me as I launched myself into a tentative adulthood.

The quest was impossible.

They knew that if Milo understood that grim fact, he would give up instantly. So they never told him, and he didn’t give up and he wound up accomplishing the impossible.

That’s a lesson I still hold on to. Things haven’t gotten any easier since I first read The Phantom Tollbooth. But the book’s wit and charm and effervescent optimism always make them a little easier to bear. That’s what I wanted to say to Norton Juster, all those years ago, in his office at Hampshire College. I’d still like to tell him. But the internet is a strange and unpredictable thing. You never know who's reading this stuff. Maybe I just did tell him, after all.

I sure hope so.

The Leaf Blower and the End of the World

2011-09-04T03:56:00.000-07:00

The gardeners are back today.

Collectively, working at different times at all the houses in the wealthy neighborhood where I rent a small house, the noise level they create renders this particular patch of luxury real estate almost uninhabitable throughout the summer. The irony used to please me; now I find it debilitating and sad. I listen to the toxic symphony of two-stroke engines: lawn mowers, weed-wackers, hedge trimmers and most of all – worst of all – the leaf blowers, and I see the end of modern society looming in their fumes and racket.

The leaf blower stands for so much that has gone wrong in our world in my lifetime. We used to take care of the leaf problem by raking them into piles and burning them. Autumn was scented by leaf smoke in those days. But the rake is too much trouble, too quiet, too simple; it requires too little fossil fuel, and with an irksome physical modesty refuses to impose itself on the world around it as the almost military leaf blower does. Engines raging, exhaust spewing, leaves flying, you can feel like a serious job is getting done.

And what exactly does the leaf blower do, for all the noise pollution and air pollution it creates? It moves leaves around. It pushes them from Mr. Johnson’s yard in to Mr. Constable’s yard; tomorrow Mr. Constable’s gardeners will come and push them back. So the leaves migrate senselessly in a grotesque waste of fuel, energy, time, money and aggravation, and no one seems to notice but me.

But this is what we do now: we create machines to accomplish what were once simple tasks in the most tortuous and destructive way possible in the name of progress. Look at the feed lots of the Midwest, which have replaced the grazing cow whose dung fertilized the grass it ate in a perfectly sustainable closed system. Now we feed the cows corn to make them grow fast enough to be profitable, and store their wastes in vast lakes that are contaminating the whole continental aquifer; and since the cows cannot really digest corn, since it makes them sick in fact, we have to pump them full of antibiotics which make their way into the body chemistry of the millions of people who eat the beef, eventually dismantling a century of progress in the fight against disease.

We replace loosely built old timber houses with hermetically sealed, climate-controlled fortresses whose very air-tight perfection breeds mold and mildew and rot. “House kits” assembled on your lot are now guaranteed for twenty years! What a bargain! The house I live in was built a hundred and fifty years ago, and it’s doing just fine, thank you.

When a big meat packer bought Park’s sausages, they soon realized that the little family-owned company was using overly expensive ingredients and manufacturing the links in a slow and in efficient manner. A team of corporate experts tackled the problem and soon they found bargain materials and streamlined the manufacturing process. On paper it was a coup for smart management -- a new era of profitability. The only problem was, the sausages tasted horrible and no one bought them. No one had considered that minor detail in the overhaul. Sales got so bad that the Parks family was finally able to buy the company back and rebuild it.

There aren’t many stories with happy endings like that.

It’s hard to fight progress.

When my Ford Escape’s exhaust manifold disintegrated at the 60,000 mile mark, (timed perfectly to match the warranty’s expiration), I complained to the service guy at the dealership, remarking that my father drove a 1959 Rolls Royce while he lived in England from 1968 to 1975. He sold it when he came back to the ‘States, for exactly what he had paid for it. All he ever did was put gasoline in the tank and change the oil. What made that car so much better than my Escape? “Well, those parts were all machined individually,” the guy informed me “They’re filed down by hand, measured to tolerances we don’t even think about, by guys who’ve been doing it all their lives. They apprentice for ten years before they even get to hold a tool in their hands. And I’m talking tools. They use calipers, for chrissake.” He lowered he voice, leaned across the counter. “Everything on your car was made as cheap and fast as it could be made, out of the cheapest grade crumbiest materials we could buy on the international market. We use aluminum and plastic. They used steel. So whatdaya expect?”

I expect new things to fall apart and old things to work: like the 1950s vintage sunbeam toaster I picked up at dump that has outlasted all its modern counterparts; like the manual Olympia typewriter I’ll probably go back to using when the last computer dies, like the antique couch whose springs and fabric remain firm and close-stitched while the fancy I sofa I bought two years ago is already falling apart.

I expect people to be lazy and machines to be elaborately. useless

I expect people to embrace music machines whose ‘earbuds’ are making them deaf, and ‘smart phones’ that can’t hold a connection, and a government that steals their liberty and their privacy and their hope of a comfortable old age for no other purpose than to secure the wealth and power of the modern Pharaohs who own their world. Nothing else works – why should the government? I expect more tomatoes grown from Florida sand with the help of a hundred chemicals, picked with slave labor and turned red in a gas chamber. I expect more bad movies made by committee, more ‘tailored’ suits glued together in sweat shops.

I expect things to decline, to subside, to fail. I expect to see the world improved to death. And tomorrow morning, I expect the leaf blowers.

I can always count on them

In Her Sleep:My MomCuring Parkinson's Disease,Nightly

2011-09-04T03:53:00.000-07:00

My Mother called me from inside her dream last night.

It wasn’t a psychic experience; she used her cell phone.

My own phone started ringing in the middle of the night. I lurched out of bed, panicked and disoriented. A call in those deep-sleep hours before dawn usually comes from the hospital, the police station or the morgue. This one came from the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, where my mother’s dream was happening.

“I need you to make some calls for me,” she said.

She sounded strong and alert. I almost never hear that crisp diction and easy authority in her voice anymore, when she’s awake. It reminded me of my Mom twenty years ago – a vibrant seventy-year-old with a busy schedule and a lot on her mind. The ninety-year-old Parkinson’s patient, fading away in the local nursing home?

No sign of her.

“What phone calls, Mom?” I managed. “It’s like two in the morning.”

“Well, I suppose you should call the film office first.”

“The film office?”

“Well, Frank seems to have disappeared and they might know where he’s gone or how to get in touch with him.”

“Frank? Who’s Frank?”

“Oh, sorry. He’s supposed to be handling the extras, keeping track of us, getting the porta-potties here. supplying us with water and snacks, making sure we’re on location when the director needs us. All that kind of thing.”

“Okay, hold on a second. Where are you exactly right now?”

“I’m sure we talked about this. I’m in the Pine Barrens. They’re making the holocaust movie and they had to do a controlled burn for this big sequence they’re shooting. But that’s what I’m worried about. This forest is a tinder box and I think the fire may be going wild. One of the extras is already suffering from smoke inhalation and another one – a very nice man – seems to have fainted. We’re doing our best to take care of them but really it’s Frank’s job and he’s nowhere to be found.”

Now I was fully awake. I was getting interested.

“Tell me about the movie,” I said.

“Well I’m not sure of the story, no one gets to see the script, but there’s obviously an escape involved, since this whole section is set in the woods. And the director is brilliant. Just brilliant. But also a little unstable. He’s always going off on tangents when he talks. He knows everything about film history, and he’s done his research on the period, but I’m not sure he’s on top of things right now. He’s out of control, Stevie, and no one’s really talking to anyone else. Very bad communications.That’s why I thought I should call you. Someone needs to co-ordinate things here.”

I told her to use the old Bob Hope trick of the mini-nap, so she could get some rest in case she had to do something strenuous later.

“Good idea,” she said, and hung up.

She’s been having these amazingly vivid dreams for several years now. Mostly she can’t remember them, but when she can, it’s very difficult for her to distinguish them from reality. We’ve all had that experience: dreaming a car crash and piecing together reality one fragment at a time after you wake up: I can move my legs, I’m my own bed, not a hospital, it was just a dream. Even so the dread can linger into the morning.

It’s much the same for my mother, just magnitudes more intense. When she was living with me before she moved to the nursing home she almost fell down the steep basement steps because she was trying to leave the Metropolitan Museum and get out to Fifth Avenue and take a taxi home. In order to accomplish this she had to traverse the whole downstairs of my house. She couldn’t get the door to the basement stairs open, luckily. This was at a time where she couldn’t walk unassisted when she was awake.

So my question is: what’s going on?

If I was a doctor this would be the total focus of my research. Some broken synapse gets circumvented when she’s asleep. Some short circuit gets corrected. She can walk. She can talk without slurring her words or getting lost in a sentence. It’s the same organic machine, the same bundle of nerves and muscles, but it works when she’s unconscious in ways she can only dream of when she’s awake. Doctors and scientists readily admit they have almost no understanding of brain function. The territory has never been explored and remains as mysterious as the bottom of the ocean or the inside of a Black Hole. The men who created the electronic chip that ‘rewires’ Parkinson patients’ brains and relieves most of the symptoms have no idea how or why it works. They discovered it by accident. Their genius was following the accident and exploring the ramifications of the unexpected. But they remain basically clueless and their awed humility in the face of these mysteries is both impressive and discouraging.

Something extraordinary is going on in the deep recesses of my mother’s mind, some eccentric nightly miracle, and no one has the faintest idea what it is. I know I can’t figure it out. All I can do it send a post out onto the internet, a tiny plea and a rallying call for the men and women doing brain research and trying to find a cure for Parkinson’s.

The cure was in the Pine Barrens last night.

But the director was out of control.

Life in the Sweet Spot of Our New Non-Economy

2011-08-04T07:45:00.000-07:00

If things get bad enough, they can turn out pretty well.

That’s the lesson my friend Dave learned recently. A year ago he was in deep trouble, struggling to pay a three thousand dollar a month mortgage, one late payment away from foreclosure, his interest rate steadily rising despite his faultless payment record -- and the price that consistency had exacted on the rest of his life. Sometimes he used credit cards to pay the mortgage -- now he had maxed all out all the cards and those interest rates were jacking up every time he missed a payment. A storm took most of the shingles off his roof, but of course the insurance company wouldn’t pay a cent to fix it. “Your house would have to burn down to get a dime out of this policy” an unusually frank insurance agent informed him wearily one afternoon.

Since he can’t sell the house with a storm-damaged roof, the thought seemed practical for one crazy second. No, he didn’t turn to arson, but I could understand the temptation. All attempts to sell the house had unraveled. The price was wrong. In our deliriously upscale resort community, people buy and sell 5 and 6 million dollar estates all the time. The houses on the market for million or two languish. No billionaire wants a tract house in a cruddy subdivision, unless it’s as a barracks for his restaurant crew. The people who do want Dave’s house can’t get a loan because the banks aren't making loans. It’s more profitable to just sit on the money the tax payers gave them and write out bonus checks. He thought about selling the place as a ‘covenant house’ – be used as affordable housing; with the sale money he could build a cottage on the property and live there. But that deal fell through.

Dave conceived desperate plans – get his eviction recoded on video and upload it to youTube and shame the loan sharks; to just walk away, as so many people in the mid-west have been doing.

But a lot can change in a year.

The main change was a revelation so grotesque and bizarre that it topped everything else in the slow-mo economic catastrophe to date: no one knew who actually owned his house. The mortgage had been bought and sold and packaged and repackaged so many times, with deeds signed by robots, and flipped for a quick buck by such an unsavory line up of con men and hustlers, that it had more or less ceased to exist. That meant he couldn’t sell his house, even if he found a buyer. But so what? It also meant that there was no need to pay the mortgage any more. No one could prove they owned the paper.

So he just stopped.

He got toothless threatening letters for a while. Recently they tried a different tack, announcing a fifty percent cut in his payment (something he’d been requesting for years). “Good news!’ the letter announced. But one phone call to his lawyer clarified this sudden advent of generosity and happy tidings. As soon as Dave wrote the first check he would be tacitly agreeing that this new bunch of crooks were the legally constituted owners of his debt. He dropped the letter in the trash.

Nice try. But Dave learned a vital lesson of our new non-economy: when a letter from the bank says “Good news”, run for the hills.

So now, thanks to the grunting, snout-shoveling greed of dozens of stupid careless trust fund truffle pigs. he’s living in his house (it’s as much his as anyone’s) for free. But it didn’t stop there. Dave developed a little swagger. When he got the next harassing phone call from the credit card company, he laid it on the line: he wasn’t going to pay them a dime. “Read your own terms and conditions, buddy. This is an ‘unsecured debt’. That means you're screwed." The man from Visa told him the consequences would be dire if he followed through with this private default. For instance? It would ruin his credit rating.

Dave just laughed. His credit rating? That little guy had been dead and buried for months, as dead as a seal washed up on the beach, dead as his old truck with the seized engine block. “Do your worst, pal,” Dave said, hanging up,

So now he lives in his house with no mortgage, pays nothing on his credit cards and finally has enough money to shop for food in the most over-priced community in the Eastern seaboard. He even goes out to dinner sometimes – cash only. He’s actually benefiting from the financial meltdown, and the uncontrolled fiscal feeding frenzy that caused it.

Life is good.

It just had to get really bad to get that way.

Jack Kirby Loses Again

2011-07-29T03:44:00.000-07:00

The film version of Thor was a smash hit a few weeks ago, the Captain America movie looks to surpass it at the box office this weekend, on the heels of The two Fantastic Four films, two more featuring the Incredible Hulk, and an entire franchise built around the X-men --- all Marvel comic book characters from the 1960s ... and all of them created by one man: Jack Kirby.

His estate suffered a crushing blow today, as the United States District Court in the State of New York denied his heirs any share in the wealth he created for so many venal, untalented mercenary shareholders and executives. It’s one more in a long line of tragic and despicable assaults on the dignity and the legacy of this extraordinary artist. He spent his declining years fighting with a steely-eyed, relentless Marvel corporate machine far more frightening than any villain he ever conjured with his pencil. He wasn’t asking for compensation, or fair treatment, or credit or even respect … he had given up on all of that long ago. All he wanted, as mortality loomed, was the right to take possession of the physical drawings themselves – the original art that he gone into the comics. They wouldn’t even give him that. Why did they hate him so much? Was it because he was so talented, so abundant, so productive that he made them feel small and puny and worthless? If so he was only a mirror and you can shatter a thousand mirrors without improving yourself at all. You’re just the same pathetic greedy parasite, standing in a drift of shards.

I suppose it’s the glory of capitalism that these people win and the great innovators and visionaries like Jack Kirby get beaten down. “He didn’t have much business sense,” the Fox and Warner Brothers executives must be chortling tonight as they pound the champagne with their cronies from Marvel: “What a sap!”

Let’s toast to that, you debased money-grubbing toads. Drink until you’re drunk and drive on some twisty road as fast as you can.

Kirby’s case is often compared to Jerome Siegel, who invented Superman and finally got credit as well as cash (albeit posthumously). But, due respect, Kirby was a far more significant figure than Siegel. Kirby invented more than the idea of putting a muscle bound do-gooder into spandex: He devised a whole heroic language and ethos, a whole richly imagined universe of grace and glamour, power and poise not in the stories he co-created with Stan Lee and later cooked up on his own, for DC Comics (the later stuff was just bad), but in the way he conceived the human figure and set it on paper. He characters had density and authority and style, and that style informs all the films made from his comics, and all the comics that came after him, even if they’re only reacting against the larger than life gusto and vitality of Kirby’s creations. More than that, they made this ten year old boy believe in some exalted and exhilarating form of heroic nobility. Kirby imbued his world with a grandeur that I had never really found anywhere else.

I remember so vividly growing up, those awful moments when I realized that Kirby had abandoned a title to a lesser artist and moved on. It happened all the time. He still did the covers, which exploded with movement and energy … but as soon as you opened the magazine, the flat lifeless replacement art made your spirit sag. Awkward an amateurish by comparison, they made you appreciate and hunger for Kirby’s gift. Sometimes he did ‘lay outs’, organizing each panel for the new guy, but even that didn’t help much. All the joy was gone. Kirby’s Thor is at the top of this post, with marvel journeyman Don Heck's version just above it.

Scroll up and take a look at them both.

I was trying to explain Kirby to my mother one rainy afternoon, and I showed her those two drawings. She couldn’t see any difference. Well, I couldn’t see the difference between Cezanne and Pissaro until I’d really studied them both. But this was like not seeing the difference between Van Gogh and Andy Warhol. These men were magnitudes of talent apart.

The decades have proved my point, as Jack Kirby's aesthetic rules the movies now and has made untold billions for the people who have appropriated it. And they won’t even give his widow and his kids some crumbs from the table he built and piled high with the bounty they’re feasting on. It’s a pity his characters aren’t real. They were all stern moralists, and I can imagine what Tony Stark, and The God of Thunder and Bruce Banner (AKA The In credible Hulk) and Steve Rogers, otherwise known as Captain America – soon to be featured together in a movie about the team Kirby conjured so long ago – would have to say about this – the battle cry that always rang out before some malevolent crackpot or would be world conquering villain got his ass kicked big time by the super team:

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!

But no. I’m kidding myself. There would be no battle royal with these spring-water sipping, limousine jockeys. They’d just sue the Avengers, and win their case in District Court and disarm them, and take everything from them, including their costumes. (“Those outfits are creating a public nuisance.Do you have a licensed for that shield? That hammer is a deadly weapon.”) And the Avengers would go along with it, because they believe in the rule of law, just like Jack Kirby did.

Saps.

Leaving Dillon, Texas: Farewell to "Friday Night Lights"

2011-07-29T03:36:00.000-07:00

The final episode of Friday Night Lights airs tonight, ending a scrappy five season run. It took the DirecTV satellite network co-financing the show to keep it on the air, in a unique deal that allowed them to air Friday Night Lights before NBC. So for Satellite subscribers the story of Dillon, Texas has been concluded for months. For Lights fans, those concluded episodes – and the delirious reviews they garnered – have been a kind of shadow broadcast, a resonance from the void. The show has been haunted by its own ghost, these last weeks. It was kind of appropriate. This cat had only five lives, after all -- not nine, and it’s lived in the shadow of its own mortality for every one of them.

It was never a hit. It always lacked the ingredients of escapism and weekly closure that make for profitable network comfort food. But that was what we loved about it. In the very first episode, golden boy quarterback Jason Street seems headed for a college scholarship and a legendary career in the NFL. He even looks a little like Tom Brady. Then Jason throws an interception and tries to tackle the other team’s free safety, as he runs it back for the touchdown. Jason makes the tackle but injures himself catastrophically. By the end of the show’s pilot we know that Jason Street has become a paraplegic. Peter Berg, the show’s creator, said somewhere that the NBC executives couldn’t quite believe this development. “He gets better, right?” they kept saying. “When does he walk again?”

“He doesn’t,” Berg told them.

And he didn’t. Instead the first three seasons of the show dramatized this extraordinary young man’s valiant efforts to come to terms with his handicap -- from trying out for a professional ‘wheelchair rugby (he didn’t make the team) to working as an assistant coach to Eric Taylor and selling cars for Buddy Garrity, his girfriend’s father. Nothing works out for Jason until he lands a job as a sports agent late in the series. You can see how his persistence and passion could make him a success in that field. Along the way he loses the lovely Lyla Garrity to his best friend Tim Riggins, but not before Buddy explains in no uncertain terms that he won’t allow his daughter to throw her life away on a cripple.

Friday Night Lights was a show about a town, not just a football team, and Buddy Garrity is a perfect example of the program’s depth and humanity. He starts out as a loud mouthed overweight mover and shaker, the classic big fish in a small pond -- plankton in a thimble. He’s a salesman to the core, and the biggest booster of the Dillon Panthers, lobbying for a bigger stadium and a jumbotron … while the school can’t even seem to find chalk for the blackboards. This is an echo of the real Odessa, Texas where Buzz Bissinger lived for a year while writing the original book-length reportage. His harsh view of a dirt-poor, football crazed town earned him so much hatred that his cousin Peter Berg had to apologize, beg and grovel to shoot the film there. He kept his word: the movie was kinder to Odessa. The TV show left entirely, setting its stories in a wholly fictional town that somehow seems more real than its actual counterpart, a fully realized setting, as vivid as Grover’s Corners or Winesburg Ohio.

It’s a place where things don’t turn out well, as a rule. Buddy has an affair and gets divorced, loses his car dealership, and winds up running a local bar, trying to raise his estranged son alone. The smart people – like his daughter Lyla, get the hell out of town. Tim Riggins, lives the apex of his life as a football star and then just drifts. His dream of “living large in Texas” with football star pal Jason Street falls apart before they even graduate from high school. He tries college and fails – he only got through high school because of local nerd Landry Clarke’s relentless tutoring. He winds up running a chop shop with his brother and going to jail to protect him. In any normal Tv show, when Tim cme out of jail he would have chnged for the better -- taken some college courses, or found Jesus, as Lyla did. He would hve met some jailhouse mentor who would have steered him straight or given him some connections for a better life on the outside. Not on Friday Night Lights. Riggins comes out of jail bitter and angry, even more lost than he was before. And that's how we like it, because that's how it really would happen. If Tim finds any peace now, in the show's closing minutes, it will be in tiny increments -- reconnecting with old girlfriend Tyra, giving up his crazy dream of working on the Alaska pipeline, coming to terms with his brother. It's not much but it's what we've come to expect from a show that never blinks as it stares down the harsh facts of real life. The moment last week when Tim, working behind the bar at Garrity's, watched his old team-mate Smash Williams on TV, scoring a touchdown for his college team, reverberated with the whole history of their troubled friendship, and all the years we've spent with them in Dillon. This is literature, as well as drama, the depth of awareness that it would normally take hundreds of pages of rigorous prose to achieve.

Matt Saracen is another good example of the subtle way Friday Night Lights uses the high school players to reveal the life of the town around them. Matt is in love with the Coach’s daughter, and the primary custodian for his grandmother, who is slipping into Alzheimer’s. Matt’s father is serving in Iraq and his return to town only reveals the unbridgeable gaps between him and his son. Even the eventual funeral doesn’t solve or soothe anything. Matt is angry and frustrated and that’s the whole of his patrimony.

Fathers are scarce in Dillon anyway – star running back Smash Williams’ father is dead, Tim Riggins’ Dad is just gone. Season three quarterback J.D. McCoy’s father Joe is an overbearing prick; season five quarterback Vince Howard’s father is a drug-dealing ex-con. The mothers carry the burden of raising their kids, from force of nature Corinna Willams to fragile Regina Howard.

The primary intact family on the show is Coach Taylor’s. Eric and his wife Tami have the best, more believable, most nuanced and realistic marriage in the history of network television. The day to day struggle of their relationship -- Tami’s eighteen years of being a coach’s wife -- feel inspiring daunting and familiar to anyone who has tried to raise a family under less than perfect conditions.

It’s a dense, teeming world, developed lovingly over half a decade, and because there’s no ‘hook’ to the show (except high school football) it’s always been a hard sell, and not just for network advertising departments. I tried to get my ex-wife Kim to watch the show for years with no success. Even when it won a Peabody award she was un-moved. She just had no interest in football of any kind – but especially high school football., Nantucket is almost as crazy about the sport (Go Whalers!) as Odessa, Texas, and indeed Buzz Bissinger who knows the island well, was originally planning to write his book about our town.

In desperation I gave the DVD of the Friday Night Lights first season to Kim for Christmas one year. She never watched it. The next Christmas, after the presents were unwrapped and we were trying to digest the home-made sticky-buns, we were rummaging for something to watch and I found the still shrink-wrapped DVD in the cupboard under the television. Busted. She had no choice at that point.

Well, we watched the fist six episodes that day. Finally I had to leave. When I stopped by the next Day Kim was upstairs watching season two on her computer.

Victory!

She’s mourning with the rest of us and she’ll be watching tonight along with a small dedicated group of die hard fans, as Friday Night Lights closes down its fragile, miraculous five year run. It’s audience over the years would have been enough to make a cable show like Breaking Bad into AMC’s biggest hit ever. It would have been enough to make any novel a bestseller to rival Harry Potter or Gone With the Wind. But it was on NBC, and it barely scraped by.

But the fact remains that watching this show felt like reading a novel, with a level of immersion it takes hundred of pages of prose to achieve. This morning I’m feeling the same bittersweet dread I’ve felt so many times before, turning the last pages of books as diverse but enveloping as and The Lord of the Rings or The Corrections.

I hate to leave Dillon, Texas, a fly-over fly speck I would never would have even wanted to visit in real life. Now I feel like some part of me will always be there.

Cancellation is a defeat, but this unlikely show had tremendous spirit, and admirers who fought for it, and it wound up doing much better than anyone ever predicted … just like the wrong-side-of-the-tracks Dillon Lions football team that Coach Taylor took to the state championships in this final season.

Win or lose, just getting there was a triumph, and you could say the same thing about these remarkable five seasons of Friday Night Lights.

Or as Coach Taylor always said, rallying his troops: Clear eyes, full hearts – can’t lose.

The Bum in the Territory: Selling Encyclopedias, Summer 1971

2011-07-29T03:30:00.001-07:00

This post originally appeared in the internet literary journal Numero Cinq

Salesmen Wanted

It was July, 1971 and Manhattan was molten in the summer heat. The air wavered over the softening asphalt and walking the furnace streets I felt like I’d been dipped in grease and dredged in grit. My girlfriend Marian and I were living in my Mom’s apartment on 82nd Street, looking for jobs. I’d been turned down everywhere.

It shouldn’t have been my first job, anyway: a nineteen year old should have some kind of resume, even if it’s only delivering pizza or babysitting. But my summers had always been devoted to leisure. At least I did my school reading and kept my room clean. It was my mother’s idea. She figured I’d be working most of my life and wanted me to look back fondly on these sun-dappled, unstressed months between school years, when I had nothing to do but dawdle and dream. I was grateful for that, but those years were emphatically over.

Still, I couldn’t find a job and the newspapers were no help. The New York Times ran plenty of ads for medical technicians and school superintendents, and ‘systems technicians’, but I couldn’t imagine even faking a resume for any of them.

So I was ready on a humid Thursday morning, when I saw the ad for “Encyclopedia Salesmen Wanted”. Marian was just as desperate, so we went down to the office together.

The Qualifier

The office was a dingy third-floor suite underneath a Judo studio. The place looked abandoned, with long folding tables like the ones they use for conventions or voter registration, unused desks, travel posters for Curacao peeling off the walls where the cloudy scotch tape had failed. But there were chairs set up in front of a blackboard and we sat with seven other kids and waited. A slim overly friendly guy in a perverse dark suit shook our hands and offered us tepid sodas: the greeter at an AA meeting. The air conditioner struggled with the solid sauna-bath heat. We listened to it whining, and the thumps and shouts from upstairs.

Finally he arrived, the star of the show -- Bob Craig: short, burly, full of barely contained energy, an attack dog in the Sphinx position, sizing you up, waiting for a command: that low growl of undivided attention. He had brown hair and brown eyes and an absolutely forgettable face. You couldn’t pick him out of a line up if you’d known him for twenty years. Blue shirt, Khaki pants, madras jacket: everyman.

“So Tad’s taken care of you?” he asked. “You all have drinks? No? Well, Tad takes his time. Don’t you Tad? You can’t rush tad. He takes an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes.”

We all laughed. It wasn’t that funny but we wanted to please him.

“So let’s get started. I made twenty four hundred dollars last week – just from my own visits. I get commissions on what my people sell but I’m not talking about that because that doesn’t matter to you. I’m talking about one guy in a van, cold-calling families in Mawah new Jersey. Twenty four hundred dollars. You can make that kind of money here. But you can’t make it anywhere else. Unless you have a gun in your hand.”

Another laugh, but a nervous one. He seemed to like the idea of a gun in his hand: the perfect sales tool.

He picked up a heavy leather bound volume off a desk.

“This isn’t real leather,” he said. “We spend our money on the inside of the book. This is the Merit Students Encyclopedia. It’s the best of its kind. In the world. You don’t have to sell it. All you have to do is show it. Let people see it. It sells itself. I sold twenty four sets last week. Four a night, six nights. On the seventh day I rested.” He waited for the laugh, moved on. “One hundred dollars a pop, commission. This is the sample volume: it gives you a hint of what the set is all about. Look at it.”

He opened it, famed past pages of lavish color illustrations, acetate overlays, maps and reproductions of great art. It was impressive. He snapped he book shut.

“I know what you’re thinking. How do I even get inside somebody’s house? How do I even start? Well, kids, that’s the easy part. That’s science.”

He was right. Two nights later I was doing it myself.

Pitching and Striking Out

We drove out of the city in Bob’s big white econoline van, facing each other on benches running lengthwise like paratroopers waiting for the drop. “Take this crumby little neighborhood by storm!” Bob shouted. “Show no mercy.” He let me off at a leafy intersection of shaggy lawns strewn with plastic toys and tethered barking dogs. It was also the pick up spot, so along with everything else, I had to remember how to retrace my steps at the end of the night. I had no idea where I was. It felt like I could have been anywhere in the vast uniform suburban America that started at the New Jersey Palisades. I walked for a while, awkward in my suit, lugging my briefcase full of samples. Finally I steeled myself and knocked on a door. A tired looking woman opened it. I could hear the high pitched screeches and shouts of sibling warfare from inside the house.

“Yes?”

“Hi,” I smiled, sticking out my hand.

“Gotta smile,” I could hear Bob saying, back in the seedy third floor office. “Big smile, fake smile, make your cheeks ache. And stick your hand out to shake. She will shake it,”

I stuck my hand out. She shook it.

“I’m doing some work in the neighborhood, talking to all the families. Do you mind if I come in and talk to you for a minute?”

I had the words right, but the words weren’t the important part. The important part was wiping your feet on her welcome mat.

` “She steps back, you step forward” Bob had told us. “It’s like a dance, kids. It’s a dance contest where you always win the prize.”

“She always steps back?” someone said.

Bob stared him down. “Always.”

“What if there’s no door mat?” some else asked.

“Doesn’t matter. Wipe your feet and walk right in.”

“I could never do that,” Marian had whispered to me.

“Yes you can,” Bob answered her. How had he even heard her? “Anyone can. That’s the beauty of it.”

So I wiped my feet on the non-existent mat and she stepped backward, just as Bob had said she would. I walked into house, made sure her husband was home, and began.

“Never pitch a woman by herself,” Bon had told us. “Her husband will cancel the deal when he hears about it. She can’t sell it like you can. She doesn’t have the tools. Okay. You walk in. You give her the Qualifier.”

I introduced myself to her pear-shaped pony-tailed husband and sat down on an uncomfortable tilting armchair, facing them on the couch.

I talked about the importance of a good reference materials, the critical first years of a child’s education, the inconvenience -- and lack of privacy -- in the woefully under-funded public libraries, which were not always located in the best neighborhoods. How was a parent to assure their child of a quality education? With a home library, like The Merit Student’s Encyclopedia, which gave you a world of knowledge at your fingertips “Without ever leaving the home.”

Then came the big finish. I hated saying it.

“This is the knockout punch,” Bob had told us. “Learn it word for word. He took a breath and spoke slowly. “‘Do you think you could be interested in a program like this … or is your child’s education something you just don’t care about?’ Snap. There’s only one answer to that one, kids!”

Marian had made the same face I remembered from the night we ate my sister’s special mashed potatoes with whole grapes: disgust, disbelief, despair. I shrugged: this meal was just beginning.

And two night later I was saying it, and they were hastening to assure me that they were passionate about their kids’ education, and soon I was laying out the big sheets with the illustrated maps and the unfolding accordion placards showing the volumes and highlighting portraits of American presidents and the gallery of great art lovingly reproduced on the ‘fine, acid free pages’.

“Box them in,” Bob had instructed us gleefully. Trap them on that couch!”

It was working, They nodded and smiled as I outlined the study aides and described the yearbooks that would update the set forever.

Then we started talking business.

I explained that under our easy credit terms ‘for well-qualified buyers like yourselves’ the set would only cost a dime a day. Then I took out the piggy bank.

“It says right on it -- ‘An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.’” Bob had told us. “So you say – “

I got it out:, let them hold it, turn it over in their handsm read the inscription. “Do you know who said that, M’am?’

“Of course she doesn’t!” Bob had crowed at us. “And she’s starting to feel foolish. Do you finish her off and humiliate her and say ‘Benjamin Franklin’? No! You say –“

“George Pal, the President of our company,’ and they both laughed just as Bob said they would, so relieved to find out I was no better than them: a jolly fellowship of educational inadequacy, all of us wanting something better for our kids, friends for life now –

“ -- and she signs and her husband signs, and you’re out of there.”

But after almost an hour of high intensity selling they folded toward each other, nervous and embarrassed.

“We just can’t afford it right now,” the man said.

“It does look wonderful though,” his wife agreed.

“Maybe you could leave your card?”

But of course I had forgotten my card.

I was exhausted when I walked out into the dark street.

“It’s like learning a part in a school play,” Bob had told us. “You get the standing ovation and we all get rich. Do well enough and you get a week in Curacao into the bargain. Interested?”

Of course we had been. It seemed too easy. We both signed up, and agreed to meet there on the following Monday at four O’clock – this was an evening job.

Trudging to the van pick-up after that first miserable night I remembered walking down Eighth Avenue with Marian after Bob’s high-powered orientation. “I’ll give it a try,” I had said. “But I’d never buy an encyclopedia from that guy.”

Marian shook her head. “You’re missing the point, Steve. He wasn’t selling encyclopedias today. He was selling the job. And we both bought it. So did everyone else.”

Mr. Professor

Marian and I pitched each other over breakfast and lunch, walking in the park and riding buses uptown, shopping for shoes she couldn’t afford at Bloomingdale’s. We worked hard.

By the next week we were doing better. Or so we thought. I gave five qualifiers one night, and proceeded to attempt five pitches. Marian gave eight qualifiers but never got any further.

“Do your qualifier!” Bob had shouted at her in the van heading back into the city. It was 10:30 at night and were all exhausted. All of us except Bob. His beady feral energy never seemed to lag. “Do it!” he repeated.

So she started, and he interrupted her every few words. “Eye contact! Show some enthusiasm! You’re doing this woman a favor! Smile! You call that a smile? That’s a grimace! ‘Something you might not care for? That’s what you said? You can’t memorize ONE ENGLISH SENTENCE? Everybody. together: Or. Is. Your. Child’s. Education. Something. You JUST. DON’T. CARE. ABOUT? Again. Now you – Marian. Do it.” She jumbled the words and started crying. “Great! That’ll sell books! That’ll move merchandise. Cry for them.”

I should have stuck up for her, but I didn’t. Bob scared me. Anyway, it it was my turn next. I had given five pitches -- and sold nothing.

I was screwing up the pitch.

“Do it now,” Bob demanded.

“Come on –“

“Do it now or walk home!”

I had forgotten parts, mixed things up, used the wrong emphasis, but the thing that really infuriated him had to do with the giant glossy-paper fold-out map of Italy.

”Did you do the tour, point out the landmarks? The Coloseum, Saint Marks Square in Venice? Go on – now you.”

“Well … this campanile is the famous ‘leaning tower’ of Pisa,” I started

“CAMPANEELY?”

“Yeah, what? It’s the word for a tower attached to another building, and – “

“Campaneely.”

“Yeah I just said -- ”

“You just made them feel like idiots because they don’t know as many big words as you do, Mr. Professor. That’s what you did. You lost them right there! Tomorrow night – stick to the script. Campaneely! Jesus.”

Once on the way home Marian had tried to call his bluff. “All hat fake negativity doesn’t fool me,” she said.

He twisted around in his seat to face her. Tad was driving, as always. His pout that precisely mocked Marian’s. He was a cruel physical mimic. “Oh no, I’m not gonna let that mean Bob Craig reverse me into making some money! I’m too smart for that.”

We went out for cheap dinners before the nights’ work and he routinely collected all out receipts – for the tax audit. He wrote off every one of our meals and God knows what else. “I love the tax audit!” he crowed one night. “It’s my favorite indoor sport. I made three hundred thousand dollars last year and got two grand back from the government. Oh man, they hate me so much.”

Once I griped about the ‘territory’ – I had picked up the phrase from him. The neighborhood seemed to be mostly older people who had no interest in a ‘students’ encyclopedia. Most of them already had the Brittanica -- clearly a better product, though you weren’t aloud to say so. Even The World Book was a better product.

One guy listened politely to my pitch and then spent half an hour trying to sell me a fire alarm.

Bob wasn’t interested in complainers.

“So I gave you a bum territory? Well I have news for you, kid. THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A BUM TERRITORY! There’s just the bum IN the territory. And that’s you!”

Years later, I saw the brilliant documentary The Salesman about guys selling Bibles in the Midwest. I smiled when I heard that familiar line. I suspect Bob had absorbed the movie so deeply he probably didn’t even know he was quoting it.

That film was his Bible.

“Uh-Uh for a Week”

If you failed often enough Bob took you on a ‘retrain’ session: you followed him around and watched him work. He had already sold two sets the night a bunch of us followed him, when we knocked on the door of a house with only one light on upstairs.

“They’re probably asleep,” Marian whispered.

“They’re awake! They’re reading. See – no blue TV light. My perfect customers!”

He wound up pitching the couple in their bedroom, with all his materials spread out on the bed, with six of us standing around watching. It was surreal. The husband said no, but the wife was infatuated with Bob’s unassuming good looks and enthusiasm.

She turned to her husband and said in the most matter-of-fact tone imaginable, “Either we buy this encyclopedia right now, or it’s uh-uh for a week.”

So he sold a total three sets that night.

It was the same pitch I always gave. What was the difference? I once heard that the original choice for Rick in Casablanca was Ronald Reagan. And Paramount wanted Frank Sinatra to play the Godfather.

Casting is everything.

Success Stories

The year before the most successful team member was a petite blond named Jennifer. She was a little slow but very sincere. She had never grasped that she was actually selling a set of reference books. She though she was enrolling families in an educational program (the books were a bonus). They thought so, too. But they also believed that George Pal said that line about an investment in knowledge.

Tad got drunk one night, sat her down and told her the truth.

“You’re a salesperson, honey.”

“I am not!”

He took an hour to convince her. They had to go over the small print in the sales contract. She quit the next day.

The FTC made them change the pitch a few months later. We were giving the revised version.

The only two people who did well with it were Amelia, the chubby blond daughter of wealthy diplomats, and Joel D’Hue, a six foot four, jet black regally handsome impeccably polite Jehova’s Witness from the Seychelle Islands. I thought it was ironic that our best salesman had no interest in Curacao. It would be like offering me a vacation in Brooklyn. I think Joel intimidated people, not with his size or even his color but with his immense dignity and patience. You didn’t want to disappoint him. Even Bob was intimidated: Joel wouldn’t work on Saturdays and there was nothing the boss could do about it.

“Is there a Jehova’s Witness Protection agency?” I asked once. “I mean – you see someone turning a woman to stone, you could testify against the guy, put him away for a long time.” Not funny. “God is omniscient, Steve,” he said quietly. “You cannot hide from God.”

I did make Joel laugh once, though -- when I told him I liked mangoes. “Mangoes?” he said. “There are twenty varieties of Mangoes where I live. That would be like me saying to you I like ‘the car’ as if there was only one brand. Mangoes!” He laughed and laughed at that one.

“This is the Crap You’re Selling”

The first set I sold I forgot the Closer. I guess I figured it would never come up. Bob had to come in and finish off the paper work. I knew I was never going to live that one down. The second set I sold was to a military couple and they were refused because their credit wasn’t good enough. “But it’s only a dime a day,” I said to Bob. He cackled. “Yeah, for the rest of their lives. They wind up paying a grand for a two hundred dollar encyclopedia.”

How could it be so cheap? I found out the next night. I had barely begun my pitch when the man stood and said, “You’ve never seen this goddamn encyclopedia have you? Have you? Have they ever let you look at it?”

I shook my head.

“Well I bought into the whole education program bullshit last year, and I got the crumby encyclopedia – it’s on the shelf over there. Behind the ficus tree. Take a look. Be my guest.”

I was shocked. It was absurdly, comically cheap – bad paper, runny ink … and they had crammed every illustration in the twenty volume set into the sample volume. It was cheesy and bad. It reminded me of those X-shaped housing projects way up north on the East Side: grim and miserable.

“This is the crap you’re selling,” the guy said to me. “What do you say about that?”

I had nothing to say. I just got out of there.

The Real World

Outside in the street of the quiet little subdivision I could smell barbecue fires. I could hear people having drinks on their front lawns. They were at home, enjoying the night, relaxing with their friends. That was where I wanted to be. Marian felt the same way.

We both quit the next day.

“I don’t think I like the real world very much.” Marian said to me. She had never sold a single set. She actually talked one couple out of it.

We went back to school a few weeks later. We broke up that year. Maybe she’d seen me browbeaten by Bob Craig too many times. Maybe I was just one more part of the real world she wanted to avoid for as long as possible. I know the summer took its toll on us.

As for Bob and the gang, the FTC chased Merit Students Enclyclopedia all the way to Canada, where I hear Bob got to go back to his old, more comprehensively deceptive pitch.

I guess Bob didn’t like the real world much, either. I’m pretty sure Wikipedia eventually killed off the Merit Students’ Encyclopedia. I bet Bob Craig is still working it though, all these years later, sunning himself in Curacao, selling something else.

Maybe even Bibles.

The Hurricane Files: Confessions of a Tropical Depression

2011-07-29T03:27:00.000-07:00

I just feel like a total failure, okay?

I had so much potential, that’s what everyone was saying, how much potential I had. I envy old people, no tells them about their potential, they don’t have to disappoint anyone. I started out great, I was so strong I felt I could really do something, make a difference. I mean, I was a category, four, man! They were taking pictures of me from these little planes, a couple of them almost crashed, and doing all these computer models trying to figure out where I was headed, what towns I was going to destroy how many billions I was going to cost in property damage and flooding and downed power lines and projectile lawn furniture and – I don’t know, all of that stuff. I could have even killed some people, I could have, are you kidding me? Those crazy birdbrains who try to wait out the storm. Oh yeah, I was looking forward to blowing in their windows, blasting them with shards, pulling their roofs off, knocking a tree down on them. Bugt there weren’t many, Everyone was evacuating. I love the sound of that word. Evacuating – those long lines of cars, packed with precious belongings and screaming kids and antsy dogs, running away -- from me!

Those were good times. But nothing lasts. I was just kidding myself. Mr. Big Storm. I don't mean to sound sexist but how am I going to face Katrina and Dora and Carla and Helene and all the other girls now? “How did you do? How was your storm surge? I bet you had a huge storm surge.”

Well, I didn’t have any storm surge, okay? I unraveled like an old slinky toy. I lost it, I couldn’t keep a tight spiral. Then I got into the cold water and I hate cold water and I just saw the whole thing falling apart. No guts, no stamina. I could hear the news stories in my head: “Leaves are down all over Nantucket island!” Not power lines and hundred year old elms. Not even twigs. Just leaves! What a loser. I don’t even know why I bothered. There’s always stronger better storms coming up behind you. If you’re not in the record books you’re no one. You’re a joke. The ‘no name’ storm was better than me – they called it the perfect storm and no one even bothered to name it. What does that make me? The piddly storm? The puny storm? Windy drizzle, that’s the best I could come up with.And this was my one shot. Okay? It’s not like you get a second chance to make a first impression. You charge up in the gulf stream and make your run up the coast and that’s it. No do-overs, no excuses. Earl. I should have known something was up when they named me after some idiotic TV show, both of us cancelled. We can be neighbors in the trivia dictionary. I’m sure we’ll have a lot to talk about. “Did you totally suck? Me too.” Except Earl made through five seasons, and when people laughed it was in the good way. With, not at. You know the difference, People laughed with Buster Keaton. They laughed at Charlie Chaplin. But I'm not even in that class. I’m the crap comedian doing the midnight show that no one laughs at at all. I get the shrug. The big shrug. Fine, I deserve it.

I feel so guilty. I let everyone down. I kicked up a little surf, a few measly riptides, but that was all gone the next day. You’d never even know I was there. Just blue sky and people making jokes and taking down all the plywood they didn’t need, feeling stupid and blaming me. Well they’re right to blame me. They counted on me. All those weather girls and boys with their perfect hair look like worse idiots than ever now, hyping me the way they did. But you could see the real meteorologists, the ones with the bad suits and cheap glasses, the ones they didn’t let on camera very much, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes. They knew the real story. They saw right through me, right from the start. They knew I was a big fat nothing and getting less every second. They knew I was no Hurricane Bob. He made it all the way up the coast. People still talk about him. He meant something to people. Not like me. Not like good old Mr. Fizzle. That’s what they should call me. Mr, Fizzle. There’s just one thing in the world I’m supposed to do and I can’t even do that. What a waste.

I was thinking of getting my spin up, really hitting Maine and the Maritimes, but really, what’s the point? I just don’t care any more. I’m just going to take a couple of my tropical anti-depressives and go to sleep. So don’t bother putting away your lawn furniture, Canadians. I may never wake up at all.

That would show them, that would teach them a lesson.

They’ll miss me when I’m gone.

Mimi Beman's Nantucket: A Eulogy

2011-07-29T03:26:00.001-07:00

It’s a common story: lovely small town or coastal community (Nantucket is both), languishes for years as the slightly seedy refuge for old money and new hippies, until the new rich people discover it, and start turning it into a warped version of their own gated communities in Summit, New Jersey or Houston, Texas. Eventually, they ruin the charm that brought them to the place … and they move on. Corrupting an unspoiled place with money must be like stomping through new snow in big muddy boots: painlessly destructive fun that lets you leave your mark on the landscape. For the people who actually live in the community, the process can be a painful one, and sometimes a single iconic event brings the whole sad down-spiral into focus. For some people on Nantucket, it was the saga of the Dreamland theater, a lovely old venue that was originally a meeting house that was floated down harbor and installed in town. Decades of kids saw their first movie there, or worked the concession stands. A whole era of the theaters existence was lived in the shadow of a potential sale. Few Nantucket families can resist the urge to cash in, but the tragic thing is that the theater could have been sold to the town or the Land Bank or some other civic organization and preserved in all its faded glory. But no, The place went to the highest bidder and has been passed from owner to owner, all of whose grandiose plans for it fell though.

Now the Dreamland is owned by a foundation under the control of Wendy Schmidt, wife of the Google CEO. She is the latest in the line of town saviors – it goes back to the seventies and Walter Bieneke. For Wendy, the Dreamland is a ‘game changer’ – soon to be a cross between corporate headquarters and major arts center, drawing talented people from all over the country, turning Nantucket into a hub of creativity and innovation. Yeah, well, Thanks, anyway. We just want the old Dreamland theatre back. We liked Nantucket as quiet little town. The new theater is almost twice the size of the original. It looks like a grotesque landlocked ocean liner, dwarfing the buildings around it, totally out of proportion to the town it's intended to rescue.

So that’s kind of sad and a lot of people are upset about it. But my feelings didn’t really crystallize until last Sunday’s memorial service, held in the library garden across the street. The deceased was our beloved bookshop owner, Mimi Beman. She died suddenly of cancer more than six months ago, and the funeral was private. Many people wished for a more public memorial and finally two wealthy women organized the ceremony.

I attended. I got the invitation several weeks in advance and was told that people were going to speak about her – kind of an open mike. I spent the days thinking about my old friend and preparing my remarks. I knew Mimi would want me to say something.

But the service was not what I expected and not what Mimi would have wanted. A select group of famous and prominent people paid their respects and then it was over. Apparently there was a list of approved speakers. I wasn’t on it, and was never told about it. Neither were many of the other old friends who wanted to say few words about this extraordinary woman.

The irony was caustic. To hear people speaking so poignantly about the old Nantucket and the changes they had weathered with Mimi’s support, during a service during which only the celebrated and prominent were allowed to speak – in the very shadow of the grotesque new Dreamland theater, icon of the worst excesses of new money Nantucket, was enough to make you cry for Mimi all over again. Does that really sound like her tombstone: “Only the famous matter.”? For her, it was just the opposite. If she was in heaven watching she would have been furious. I can just see her -- spitting out her mocha latte and lighting another smoke just to calm down.

So, Mimi, here’s what I was going to say:

Well … you finally got me out of my painting clothes. But I knew you’d disappointed if I turned down an opportunity to talk too much. I can vouch for Nat Puilbrick’s story: I carried hundreds of boxes of his books down to your basement over the years, and you hand sold every one of them. When I heard Mimi had died it was a horrible shock. She was as much of an institution on this island as the Atheneum itself. It was like walking into town and seeing a vacant lot at the corner of India and Centre Streets. It just seemed inconceivable that she could be gone. There’s so much to say about her. But I should start by saying – she was hot. She was a wildly attractive, charismatic woman with her big hugs and her smoky tenor voice and I had a major crush on her for years. She was a good friend. She hand sold hundreds of copies of my little self-published thriller, she let me barter for books by lugging the boxes downstairs. Her recommendation letter got me into graduate school. She was tough and shrewd about the business. When I was bemoaning the fact that I couldn’t sell my memoir, she said bluntly. “What did you expect? You’re not famous.” I didn’t go in to her store every day, and I don’t go into the Atheneum every day, either, But Nantucket would be different place without the library, and the world is a different place without Mimi Beman – not as much fun, not as interesting, not as exciting. There’s a quote she loved from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast:

In Paris during the springtime the only problem was where to be happiest and if you could void making appointments, the days had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness, except those few who were s good as the spring itself.

Well she was one of them and I miss her. This is around the time when she’d be telling me to shut up, so I will.

What can I say? This was a memorial service built in the image of the wealthy matrons who could afford to pay for it. The town is being rebuilt the same way. Wendy Schmidt saved Mitchell’s Book Corner, too, leasing it to one of Mimi’s old assistants, just as she paid off the mortgage on the Basket Museum. I suppose we should all be grateful.

But I think of the lovely old house on the corner of Gardner and Main Streets, sold by the venal new heirs of a family which owned it for generations. The inside was gutted completely because the old ceilings were too low for the faux-antique furniture the new owners had purchased. Now the whole building is a faux antique, though it still boasts its Nantucket Historical Association plaque, endorsing the falsehood that anything remains of the original structure and its stubborn, shabby spirit. I guess the old house was 'saved', too. But it's hard to be grateful.

It deserves better. The Dreamland Theatatre deserves better. Nantucket deserves better.

And so does Mimi Beman.

Taking Out the Improvements: "Game of Thrones" & HBO

2011-07-29T03:24:00.000-07:00

I had a lively a post-mortem conversation about Game of Thrones, the recently concluded HBO mini-series, over dinner with my friend Neil last night. Afterward I thought about a meeting I took at a Hollywood studio many years ago. They were looking for someone to adapt a certain well-known thriller to the screen.

“What’s your take on it?” the executive asked me, after we had settled down on the couch with our spring water and coffee. In other words: discuss your vision of the film, and the changes you plan to make that will brand it as your own project and the unique product of this company.

I had heard this same question too many times; or maybe I’d just had too many cups of coffee that morning.

“My take,” I said. “Is to be true to the book and not fuck it up.”

“Excuse me?”

“You spent millions of dollars to buy this book. Smart move. It’s well written, it’s well plotted. It’s exciting and it makes sense. I suspect the author knows more about story telling than I do and I’m certain he knows more about story telling than you do. The architect who designed this building probably knows more about how it was built than the tour guide who strolls past it every day. So I’d respect that.”

You guessed it: I didn’t get the job.

And they filmed the book and, put their stamp on it and ruined it, as they so often do. I was right in that meeting but it’s hard to make the case in any positive way because so few adapted films show any fidelity to their source material. “The book was better than the movie” has become a cliché for good reason. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Looking back to films as diverse as Women in Love, The Lord of the Flies and The Godfather, or more recently, the filmed versions of a variety of books, from Darkly Dreaming Dexter to Lonesome Dove, you can see the benefits of trusting the original author.

Of course those last two projects were mini-series, multi-part productions devoted to presenting a single work. If you want to avoid tragic cuts and drastic re-structuring, this is clearly the way to go.

Which brings me to A Game of Thrones.

I had heard about George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire but dismissed as one more tedious sword and sorcery epic, a Dungeons and Dragons drone for the reading impaired. I watched the first episode on HBO because I trust the cable network to make interesting shows. It soon became clear that this was no ordinary Tolkien retread. There was sex in it, for one thing; and many of the most interesting protagonists were children. I assume they’ll grow up as the story continues.

Westeros, the world presented in this ten-hour version of Martin’s first volume, is harsh and brutal and unforgiving. A King’s last will and testament is torn up like last week’s shopping list by the usurpers taking the crown; the foreign born queen carrying a king’s baby is blithely informed, as the King succumbs to festering wounds “If he dies, you’re nothing.” Characters who try to act decently get beheaded for their trouble. In many ways Westeros resembles the New Jersey of The Spopranos far more than Middle Earth or Narnia. There is magic but it only manifests itself as terrifying wraiths from the northern lands beyond the great wall. There were dragons once, but all that remains of them are some calcified eggs. Winter is coming and it can last for decades.

What illuminates this grim landscape, what makes this bleak narrative so exhilarating, is the characters, and the tough choices they make in the face of the ruthlessness and desolation around them.

Eddard Stark, the noble and well intentioned second-in-command to the bulging, blunt and boisterous King, Robert Baratheon; his children … Robb., the eldest, not quite ready to become a King in The North, as his ancestors called themselves; his younger half-bother, the bastard Jon Snow, committed to the Night’s Guard and a life of isolation and chastity guarding the wall; fourteen year old Sansa, madly in love with the creepy Prince Joffrey; eleven year old Arya, a classic tomboy studying fencing and determined to live her own life; and Bran, nine years old, irrepressible human fly, crippled after a being pushed from the wall of high tower after overhearing Queen Cersei Lannister and her awful twin brother Jaime plotting treason. There are other Lannisters, including the dwarf Tyrion, played by Peter Dinkelage in a show-stealing, emmy-grabbing tour-de-force performance. There are Tullys, too and Targarayens, including puny Viserys, who sells his sister Daneyris to the Dothraki Horse Lords in hopes of using them as an army to reclaim his throne. That doesn’t work out too well, at least for Viserys, who gets ‘the golden crown’ he longs for, Wars of the Roses style: a tub of molten metal poured over his preening, conniving little head.

The show is brilliantly cast, with actors -- even in the most minor parts -- attentively chosen, with one eye on the text. Yes, yes …Tyrion is described as ugly, and Dinkelage is astonishingly handsome, but I’m sure George Martin doesn’t really mind. Apart from anything else I’m sure there are thousands and thousands of readers just like me, brought to his books by the series, and multiplying the sales of A Song of ice and Fire exponentially with every new episode.

Reading the first volume now, I’m continually amazed by the rigor of HBO’s fidelity to the written word. Martin himself must be stunned, watching the series, at the precision and detail, from the look of Arya’s little sword, 'Needle', to the choreography of her fencing master’s last stand against the King’s Guard. Martin must approve – he even wrote one of the episodes himself. David Benioff, the main writer, is a novelist himself. That might have something to do with it.

Hard as it might be for the average film executive to understand, no ‘take’ was required here. Playwright George S. Kaufman famously sent telegrams to his cast from the back of the theatre. I suppose he’d text them today. “Am standing at the back of the theatre. Wish you were here.” One of the most famous of his acid messages went: “Dress rehearsal at 10:00 A.M. tomorrow, to take out the improvements.”

Well, no improvements were made here; no ‘fresh ideas’ or studio notes. No characters were softened or made more lovable or given better ‘arcs’. And the mini-series, which trusted its source material so completely, succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, almost tripling its audience in the course of its run.

Naturally, such success has its own built-in liabilities. “I can’t believe I have to wait two years to find out what happens next,” Neil said to me last night.

But he doesn’t.

There are four more volumes available right now at every bookstore in America,

The next one is called A Clash of Kings.

I’ll be starting it tomorrow.

Peter Falk and theLost World

2011-07-29T03:21:00.000-07:00

So Peter Falk died last month, and someone posted the 41-year old video of his appearance on the Dick Cavett Show with John Cassavetes and Ben Gazzara. It was exhilarating to watch, but also sad and profoundly disturbing -- a time-capsule message from another era, or perhaps another world altogether. I’ve tried to embed some of it here because I think you may have to actually see it to understand what I’m trying to say. Having given up on that effort, at least for the moment, I have to direct you to the link at the bottom of this post. It's worth the extra effort when you see them saunter on stage, instantly owning it, Falk with his cigarette, Gazzara with a drink and a cigar.

Of course the first thing that strikes you is how impossibly young they all were. Cavett looks good for his age now (75), but Gazzara suffered a stroke in 2005, Cassavetes died in 1989 and of course, Falk is gone , too. They seemed immensely grown up to me when I first saw that broadcast. Well, of course -- I was eighteen years old, they were pushing forty. They were my Dad’s age. The odd thing is they still seem more grown up than I am, though I long overtook the phantoms on youTube. In fact I’m now technically old enough to have been one of their fathers. If my girlfriend in college really had been pregnant during that terrifying month of October, as the Viet Nam war was winding down, our child would be 39 years old now, a year younger than Gazzara was at that taping, two years younger than Cassavetes.

I get a migraine just thinking about it.

So why do they seem so powerful, so charismatic, so adult to me, even today? Why would they overwhelm and triviliaze some parallel talk show moment … Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinksi on the Jimmy Fallon show, or Matt Damon and Ben Affleck chatting with Conan? Those guys are all kids – little boys, playing at adulthood in the Hollywood Frat house. They seem flimsy and posturing by comparison. But it’s not their fault, that’s the worst part. It’s not something simple like … we have a puny new group of movie stars cluttering the multiplex screens … if that’s even true.

It’s about the times, not the people.

The era: the late sixties and seventies, when America was still the most powerful nation on earth, riding the storm surge of power and wealth from World War II. Yes there were cracks and fractures in that world, but they were easy to ignore. Our parents smoked and wore blocked hats and gave big cocktail parties and drank from flasks of rye at football games; we protested and demonstrated and smoked weed and ended the war in View Nam and brought down the President. Heady times. Who could have guessed that our swaggering parents would get lung cancer from the smoking and cirhossis from the booze, and that we would become the safety first, rules-making, no-kid-rides-a-bike-without-body-armor scared of its own shadow generation, about to drag the world into insolvency with our collective medicare and social security costs?

What did faded movie star Norma Desmond say in Sunset Boulevard ? “I’m still big. It’s the pictures that got small.” Well, it’s the whole world that’s shriveling now. We live in a diminished, attenuated world, one that seems to be running down like a hand cranked sewing machine. There are too many people, and too little of everything else – food, water, oil, education, breathing space. There was a kind of power moving through the world that Gazzara and Cassavetes and Falk inhabited, like the immense pulses of energy that move through the Pacific from the great Aleutian storms, creating the giant waves that break in Hawaii and the Northern coast of California.

That energy has drained from the world somehow, We’re all sitting in inflatable rafts in swimming pools, our new world tiny and tame and chlorinated. The power surging through their world made the success and charisma and swagger of those men possible: a world where a major studio like Columbia Pictures would finance a movie like Husbands. Today you’d have to shoot it on your iPhone and post it on YouTube; at best it might make the festival circuit and die a quiet death on the Sundance Channel. They were big stars making films for a major movie studio. America’s post-war wealth and confidence carried them along. It might not have created their stature but it gave them a place to stand.

Okay it was all an illusion, but it was a grand illusion and I miss it.
Watch the video. I think you’ll miss it, too.

http://youtu.be/4NiThZ8tJLI

Suspense and Sensibility: Appreciating Thomas Perry

2011-06-21T04:38:00.000-07:00

The Informant, Thomas Perry’s nineteenth novel, was published last week. It’s an appropriate occasion to step back and take a look at this extraordinary, underrated author’s body of work. His first novel, The Butcher’s Boy, came out in 1982 and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel a year later. He hasn’t made much of a splash since then, partly because his books have never been made into films. He advanced a theory about why this might be, during a 2003 exchange with Roger Birnbaum:

TP: In a way I don’t really think about it much anymore. My first book, The Butcher’s Boy, was in option continuously for 18 years. It was never out of option. There are studios that don’t exist anymore that had these things. At some point every working screenwriter in Hollywood has a bad script for one or another of my books. Which is why they all hate me. So, I don’t know.

RB: I’m not seeing the connection. They write bad scripts and they hate you?

TP: These are people who have written good movies. And they are hired to write a script of one of my books and it just doesn’t work out. It’s partly an obvious problem. Most of my main characters spend most of their time alone. And when they are not alone, whatever they say aloud is a lie. So, it’s confusing and very difficult to make a movie out of that. You have to invent some bogus character who is going to be the interlocutor. That’s one thing. And very often you have to soften the protagonist because he is amoral or something. Or has some other minor drawback.

I’m convinced there’s a different explanation.

Perry’s books resist adaptation for the same reason that many books do: their literary quality is simply not translatable to the medium of film. Thomas Perry writes escapist fiction. I’m sure he’d be amused to hear me accuse him of making literature. And yet, in his small and particular way, that is precisely what he does.

The next obvious question is – what do I mean by literature, anyway? No one would confuse Thomas Perry with Marcel Proust. If we define literature as “Proust-like”, as densely written, largely internal depictions of small resonant events and complex emotional states, mixing dreams and memories and philosophical musings, setting them all in the context of the larger world, to give a vivid sense of a living culture, a political and personal eco system, a pond we describe by studying the food chain of human connection and the plankton of a single life … then – no. That’s not Perry’s game. Put another way, a way most people would sheepishly agree to … “Literature” is boring and overly descriptive and difficult to read. Most of us enjoy books as consumers, not critics, and have little interest in image patterning or thematic subtext. We are taught that good literature is meant to be an ordeal, and to feel guilty pleasure for the stories we enjoy.

If it’s fun, it can’t be serious, and vice versa.

I have an alternate view of what makes for authentic literature. Internal or external, active or inert, stream of consciousness or unexamined action … none of those techniques are definitive – great books come in all styles and sizes. But the one thing that all the books I take seriously have in common is a feeling in the text of the author’s personality and point of view, his unique slant on the events he’s describing … his sensibility.

Sometimes you can feel crowded by it, as you do with Herman Melville; reading Moby Dick can feel like sitting at a bar long after closing time with a garrulous drunk who refuses to shut up and just has to tell you one more factoid about whale blubber or the symbolism of the color white.

At the other end of the scale you have many of today’s thriller writers -- Perry’s competition. Writers like Harlen Coben, John Lescroart, James Patterson and John Grisham specialize in no-frills story telling, designed for the plot hungry and the easily distracted: this happened and it caused that to happen which made for a terrible situation which could only be solved by the hero doing this … which made things worse and caused that … and so on, with crises and solutions falling like dominoes, one into the other until they’re all flat on the table and the book is done. How the weather was and what these ingenious heroes and diabolical villains were feeling or thinking (beyond the way out of a locked room or the stab of fear when the shots ring out) doesn’t really matter to anyone. The reader’s single command is: Get OnWith It. You could read the complete works of Jeffery Deaver or David Baldacci, among many others, without ever getting the slightest sense of who these men really are, what they feel and how they see the world. It’s genre fiction and it’s generic fiction, and it could have been written by anyone, which may be why so many of these writers (Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler among them) have been outsourcing the actual writing of their books, for years.

Sometimes, browsing through bookstore, it seems like you’ll never find an authentic human personality behind the plots and predicaments. Then you turn away from the multi-part sword and sorcery epics and introduce yourself to J RR Tolkien; you put down the latest space opera and try a speed date with Phillip K Dick.

Or you take my advice and read your first Thomas Perry novel.

Start where I did, with the Jane Whitefield books.

Jane is a half-Seneca Indian woman who acts as a “Guide” – she leads people away from places where their lives are in danger and brings them to new places, where they’ll be safe. In other swords -- she’s a one-woman witness-protection agency. She knows how to procure false papers and build false identities, how to disappear and live inconspicuously. As she concludes about Pete Hatcher, a client on the run from mobsters who own the gambling casino where he works,

The way he would defeat his enemies was to outlast them. While they were staring at computer screens or loitering late at night in airport baggage areas or sitting in cars outside hotels at check-out time studying each male who came out the door, he had to be somewhere, living a normal, reasonably contented life. If he could do that for long enough, they would give up. (Shadow Woman, p.224)

Perry weaves Jane’s Indian heritage into the fabric of every story, as in this moment, as she is about to go to the aid of a small orhan boy in mortal danger from criminal financial predators trying to steal his inherited fortune. Jane has just received a ‘present’ from a previous client named Rhonda Eckerly – Jane never accepts formal payment for her work. The two hundred thousand dollars will come in handy for the task ahead:

As she locked her door and took a last look at her house, she thought about the old days, when Senecas went out regularly to raid the tribes in the south and west in parties as small as three or four warriors. After a fight they would run back along the trail through the great forest, sometimes not stopping for two days and nights.

When they made it back to Nundawaonoga, they would approach their village and give a special shout to the people to tell them what it was they would be celebrating. But sometimes a lone warrior would come up the trail, the only one of his party who had survived. He would rest and eat and mourn his friends for a time. Then he would quietly collect his weapons and extra moccasins and provisions and walk back down the trail alone. He would travel all the way back to the country of the enemy, even if it were a thousand miles west to the Mississippi, or a thousand miles south beyond the Cumberland. He would stay alone in the forest and observe the enemy until he was certain he knew their habits and defenses and vulnerabilities. He would watch and wait until he had perceived that they no longer thought about an Iroquois attack, even if it took a year or two.

It occurred to Jane as she got into her car that Rhonda’s present had come at a good time. If she stopped to deposit it on the way to the airport, it would buy a lot of spare moccasins. (Dance for the Dead, p. 115)

Jane’s Indian heritage affects her ethics as well. In Shadow Woman she appeals to tribal leaders, asking them to reject the idea of running a casino on Iroquois land. “Once gambling comes in you’ve got to think of what else happens,” she tells Billy Peterson, the Sadagoyase – the clan Seneca clan leader. “New York state will wanted a vested financial interest, the way they did with the Oneidas, and they’ll have to police the gambling and everything around it. There’s a big difference between having the cops investigate a crime every ten years and having dozens of them move in with you to protect the financial interests of the legislature and it’s cronies.”

“What cronies?” Billy asks.

“Building casinos and hotels can’t be done without money from outside. That means some big corporation with investors and boards of directors is going to have more to say about what goes on here than we are. It may have occurred to you that Senecas haven’t had a lot of luck trusting either the State of New York or big corporations in the past. This state has a perfect record. It has never, even in the most minimal way, lived up to any agreem3nt it has ever made.”

Jane doesn’t quite convince the Sadagoyase, but Perry ties the scene off in his own resonant, distinctive way, as Billy watches Jane walk back to her car:

As she passed under the big hemlock and the sunlight fell in bright dapples on her head and shoulders, he felt himself losing perspective. He could not help feeling he had just received an official visit from his grandmother’s grandmother. (Shadow Woman pp. 95-7)

Jane is exigent and unsentimental, ruthlessly clear in her judgments, sharply articulate in expressing them … rather like Perry, himself. The astringent perceptions speckle the books and touch you as you read like summer rain on your face. Of a silent woman in a county lock-up he remarks, “She never spoke to anyone, having long ago lost interest in what other people gained from listening, and having gotten used to whatever they expelled by talking.”(Dance for the Dead, p. 72). Hiding out at the University of Michigan, the 28-year-old guide makes this unflinching assessment of herself: “There were places where she could still pass as a college girl, but college was not one of them.”(Dance for the Dead, p 197) Of her own husband, a successful surgeon, she notes, “Carey was very good at constructing fair, logical solutions to other people’s problems.” (The Face Changers, p.67) Of the three urban gang-bangers she entices to help her follow an escaping villain, spicing the request with the hint of possible danger and death, Jane thinks, “The part about killing seemed to have raised their level of interest considerably. She had forgotten for a moment about seventeen year old boys. There had never been a moment in human history when anybody hadn’t been able to recruit enough of them for a war.” (Dance for the Dead, p 231)

Jane’s pitiless self-examination and her pragmatic judgment of shifting situations shows clearly in this passage from the fourth book in the series, The Face-Changers. After demanding that she give up helping fugitives, Jane’s husband Carey McKinnon reverses himself when Richard Dahlman, a great surgeon who also happens to be Carey’s oldest friend and mentor, comes to Jane in desperation, framed for murder. Jane is taking Dahlman to a house where very bad people sell very good false documents for very large sums of money:

Jane frowned, and there was an edge in her voice. “I need to say a few things, so listen carefully. As long as I could, I’ve kept you in the part of the world you’re familiar with. People aren’t entirely rational in that world but they behave as though they were, and they make sure that their actions have to do with attaining reasonable goals – that is, things they’re allowed to want Their way of getting them is by a logical series of causes and effects: you work, you get paid. You’re patient, you get rewarded. You’re pleasant, people like you. I kept you in that world for several reasons. You’re a success in that world you so you know how it works and can move around in it without raising eyebrows. Something as simple as using grammatical English and holding a fork correctly makes you almost invisible. You also feel comfortable there, and that makes you look innocent. But the main reason I kept you in that world is that it’s safer.”

“Safer than what?” Dahlman’s voice was skeptical

“Safer than where we’re going now.”

“And where is that? What do you mean by other parts of the world? Are we leaving the country?”

Jane looked at him and there was a touch of regret in her eyes. “I’m trying to prepare you for a shock. I hope it’s not a big one, but it might be. The people we’re going to see are not like you, not like Carey. I‘d like to say they’re not like me either, but this isn’t the first time I’ve been here.” As soon as Jane said it, she realized she had identified the hurt that had been constricting her chest. She was back in this life. It was as though she had happily fallen asleep in the old house beside Carey, and awakened with a start along the path by the lake. The place where she walked now wasn’t a point in space; it was a point in time, in the past. Falling back into this place was not like being abducted. It was like being unmasked. (The Face Changers, pp. 130-1)

Jane is caught between two worlds and the binary nature of reality figures prominently in Seneca lore, as well. Two brothers, Hawenneyu the creator and Hanegoategeh the destroyer, struggle over the world, fighting each other at every turn:

Hawenneyu makes a little boy. Hanegoategeh gives him a virus. Hawenneyu strengthens his body to give him immunity, and Hanegoategeh makes the virus mutate and sends the boy of to kill eighty thousand people. Hawenneyu has made sure that one of the eighty thousand is a man who would have started a war and killed eighty million. (Blood Money, p.61)

The protagonists of Perry two main series form a similar dichotomy: Jane Whitefield, who saves people -- and The Butcher’s Boy, who kills them for money. The three novels in this series, The Butcher’s Boy, Sleeping Dogs and Perry’s latest book, The Informant, tell the continuing story of a professional assassin’s war with the Mafia overlords who hired and then betrayed him. Mobster Carlo Balcontano explains the situation – and the dilemma -- about a third of the way through Sleeping Dogs:

Balcontano sighed. “They arranged a meeting to pay him, but it was really a setup to lure him out onto the Las Vegas strip and blow his head off …But what didn’t occur to them is that there a reason people keep going into dark places with people where you know only one of them is going to come out, and it’s always the same one. It’s like watching the same dog go down a hundred rabbit holes and always come out with a belly full of rabbit. When you come to the hundred and first hole, do you bet on the rabbit?”

But they keep on doing it. All the Butcher’s Boy wants is to be left alone – he slipped away to England after the first book and took up with a lovely, titled English girl who likes to make up stories (I thought of Saki’s Open Window heroine, all grown up: “Romance on short notice was her specialty.”). But the mob found him and they keep finding him and as he cuts a swath through them, he comes to the attention of one Elizabeth Waring, a Justice Department clerk in the first novel who figures out that this apparent gang war might just be the work of one man. By the second book, her theories almost get her fired, but she comes to develop a fascination and a grudging respect for he solitary killer she’s spent most of her career tracking down. As the third book opens, she’s a widow with two small children, and she’s on the Butcher Boy’s trail again, determined to save him by convincing to rat out the Cosa Nostra capos who have been trying to cap him for twenty years. He needs witness protection, but he knows the government’s interest in him will evaporate after he testifies. He’s looking for a permanent solution.

I couldn’t help thinking – go to Deganawida, New York and ask for Jane Whitefield.

This round, Waring has an even more annoying boss to contend with, and Perry understands this type of obstructionist bureaucrat all too well:

Now she had to report to a man who really had been allowed in for purely political reasons. He had, through complicated family relationships, been made partner in an old, respected law firm. The combination of family and law firm had made him a good fund-raiser for political candidates, and so he was a perfect choice for a post two levels down from a cabinet member. Fortunately, he could be counted on to leave eventually. He was a bit too arrogant to survive many meetings with his superiors, too unintelligent to inspire his staff to do great things he could take credit for, and too ambitious to sit still for long. Most of the value he could get from serving as a deputy assistant attorney genera, he’d had on the day he’d been sworn in…She steered her mind around the inevitable comparison. She had begun as a data analyst in this same building more than twenty years ago. She had repeatedly, reliably, done something none of the political appointees had ever done: she had solved crimes and put the people who committed them in prison. (The Informant, pp. 20-1)

What irks the deputy assistant most is that his office and a renegade hit man have more or less the same ambition – to disable the Mafia. Their shared goal binds Waring and The Butcher’s Boy closer and closer together in a wary alliance that flirts with friendship but never veers into the romantic. Perry is too austere and practical to allow such maudlin shenanigans. They ultimately save each others’ lives though, and that’s enough, for them and for Perry and for this reader, as well. I take Perry’s chilly unblinking pragmatism as a welcome tonic, refreshing as a dive into the ocean on an August afternoon.

It’s a frightening world that Thomas Perry explores withy such gusto, and while he’s not the only guide out there, most of the others just tell you what happened and what happened next. The best ones let you hear the gunfire and smell the cordite. But that’s not enough. They don’t intrude themselves, or cannot express themselves, or have no sufficiently interesting self to express, and so, reading their books, we’re all alone on Raymond Chandler’s dark streets. Perry is with us all the way, leading us by the elbow, raising an eyebrow, debunking a cliché, pointing out a salient fact, just as Melville talks to us through his creature Ishmael, just as Jonathan Franzen, stands above his Midwestern characters and noting “the whole northern religion of things coming to an end.”

No, Perry isn’t the equal of Melville or Franzen. But has something in common with the greats that his colleagues can’t claim: he makes a particular sound, he owns a particular tone of voice, and you keep the compassionate asperity of that voice with you long after the details of chase and pursuit are forgotten.

Maybe it’s just this: he’s good company.

And you don’t want to be alone when you’re reading, even when you’re only reading a thriller

Three Writing Rules to void at All Costs

2011-06-21T04:37:00.000-07:00

A small mercenary army of writing instructors have been making a good living for decades now, dispensing advice to hopeful neophytes, creating systems and structures, plans and pie charts, creating a step-by-step creativity that reduces a novel or screenplay to a useful object which can be taken apart and reassembled like a four-barrel carburetor or a military issue M4 carbine.

Aspiring authors have been constructing their stories using the ‘Hero’s Journey’ template, and setting the ‘second act reverse’ in their screenplays precisely at page 77 for so long now that you can almost read along with the Syd Field instructions or hear the didactic tones of the Robert McKee lecture as the predictable story unfolds. There are plenty of other sources for writing advice – MFA programs, on-line writers and editors, even the venerable correspondence courses that still poke along critiquing the unreadable and collecting their fees.

The trouble with all this advice is that much of it is useless, and most of it is wrong.

Three notions in particular have been bothering me lately, as I inch toward the half-way mark of my own new novel. I call them “The Toxic Narrative Template”, “The Write-What-you Know Fallacy” and “The Character Dossier.”

My father, quite a prominent screenwriter and playwright in his day, often spoke of publishing his own guide book, but it would have been too short to print. He believed that each story contained in its DNA, the perfect way it should be told. Pulp Fiction would not have worked as a straight chronological film; Atonement’s narrative trickery was fundamental not just to the plot but to the theme and spirit of the novel as well. To begin a small masterpiece like Room with the abduction of a young woman, her subsequent sexual captivity, her miscarriage and the eventual birth of her son would have rendered Emma Donoghue’s masterpiece – written entirely from the point of that child, starting on his fifth birthday -- into a banal piece of faux ‘true crime’ exploitation trash.

Heroes don’t need a journey and they don’t need an ‘arc’.

The archetypes popularized in the late 20th century have degenerated into tiresome clichés. The idea that protagonists must learn and grow through the course of the story is particularly irksome. Women as diverse as Scarlett O’Hara and Dagny Taggart change very little through the course of Gone with the Wind and Atlas Shrugged, respectively. After Scarlett figures out that she’s going to have to rely on herself to survive, and that happens fairly early in Margaret Mitchell’s epic story of the Civil War and the Reconstruction, it’s Scarlett’s self-blind, relentless consistency that makes her fascinating. She never does figure out that Rhett Butler is her true soul mate because she never comes to terms with the reality of her own tough, heartless and mercenary soul. As for Dagny – and whatever else you say about the book that features her in a starring role, Ayn Rand’s doorstop has been an unfailing stalwart of the Random House backlist for decades – any change in her attitudes or behavior would constitute a sort of secular sacrilege.

And it’s not just the distaff side of literature: who would be more different that jaded Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises and retarded Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury? All they really have in common (apart from castration) is the lack of a character arc. Benjy is frozen at around age six and Jake Barnes ends up at the end of the book exactly where he started: unrequitedly in love with Brett Ashley, hanging out in Paris with his motley group of ex-pat pals.

Hemingway and Faulkner: the twin peaks of 20th Century American literature … and neither one of them relied on any of the conventional narrative templates.

You don’t have to, either.

Then there’s the old saw about ‘writing what you know’. Well, of course, on a certain level you’re always writing about yourself and your own experiences, your family, your childhood and the people around you. But that’s just the base material, the set of crude resources parceled out to you more or less at random. How you use those resources is up to you. Knowing how to make a science fiction story set on a fictional version of Mars believable, knowing how to research a historical epic and then use that information to inform your story without sinking it under the weight of regurgitated facts and statistics is a vital part of any robust writing life. Use your writing as an excuse to educate yourself as Tom Wolfe does. Go out into the wider world, try to understand it, then and bring it home and make it your own. If the Emperor Caligula or the King of some barbaric horde on some distant planet bears an uncanny resemblance to your own father, so much the better. The alternative – writing an endless series of disguised memoirs where Dad’s various crimes and misdemeanors are replayed over and over again – serves no one, not even you.

Finally, there’s the character dossier. Students are told to assemble a file on each character before presuming to dramatize their behavior or put words in their mouths. In grade school we all wrote ‘book reports’ describing the themes of each assigned novel, and listing each character’s ‘traits’ : so and so was selfish but funny, liked rap music and ate orange peel. Someone else was abused as a child, smoked too much, liked climbing trees and building custom furniture.

All of this satisfied the eighth grade curriculum requirements. It might even have made for a good personal ad, but it’s all worse than useless when you sit down to write a story. So how do writers invent characters? The process is a mystery with no clear guidelines and it requires relinquishing your list-making front brain and letting your unconscious mind do most of the work. Stephen King refers to that part of his mind as a sweatshop whose workers he relies on almost exclusively, so he respects them and defers to them.

I believe that all the characters you’ll ever create are already living in some deep part of your mind. They don’t need to be designed from the outside. Just give them names and let them grow in dark basement like mushrooms. Those inventories of habit and history you compile are just a way of pretending you have some control over the process – not unlike the outlines writers draw up, knowing full well that their book will start coming to life only when the plans are abandoned.

“Follow the accident.” John Fowles advised. “Fear the fixed plan”

This was all brought home to me in my own work this week. I have a new character named Julia Copenhaver. All I know about her is that she’s a high-end Nantucket interior decorator who will become my protagonist’s lover. Where does she come from, where did she go to school? Were her parents divorced, what flavor of ice cream does she like? Is she a vegetarian, a scientologist, a football fan, a bird watcher?

I have no idea.

All I had this morning was the name.

Some inchoate sense of the person it was attached to had been growing wordlessly inside me for the last few weeks. I didn’t try to itemize any facts about her, I just started writing. I had the idea that Harlan Mallory, the 60-year old artist, would be giving a lecture at the Nantucket Athenuem and that somehow Julia would have wormed her way in there somehow.

She’s pushy – I guess I knew that much.

Here’s what came out :

Harlan Mallory stood at the podium, upstairs in the great Hall at the Nantucket Atheneum, talking about his Viet Nam paintings and wondering how he had won this dreary trifeca of social obligations: visitors up from the city, an evening spent with the relentless Julia Copenhaver, and this excruciating bout of public speaking. As far as he could see, most of it was Julia’s fault. She had convinced him to give the lecture and even assembled the slides and set up the ‘power point’ presentation so that all he had to do was push a button and talk.

“It’ll be lovely,” she had said as they paced around the outside of his new guest cottage, the previous Saturday morning, deciding on a color for the clapboard siding. “You’ll be giving back to the community.”

He had laughed at that. “And what precisely, has this community ever given to me? Just asking.”

She seemed to deflate at little at his obtuse, masculine refusal to understand the simplest things. “This community? Not much I suppose -- a warm welcome, but you’re reasonably presentable. Paved roads and police protection, but you pay taxes for that. I was thinking more of the community as a whole, the human community, the society that nurtured you and allowed you to study your art and create it in peace and sell it for increasingly extravagant prices to the four hundred people who own half the wealth of the country, approximately three hundred and twenty two of whom spend at least some part of August on this island. You’ve had a lucky life. It’s seemly to show your appreciation in small ways. This would be one of them.”

There was no way to refuse at that point without looking like the bitter old crank that he actually was; but he did make one attempt, revealing that his old friends the Barudskys would be on-island that weekend: other plans, previous engagements, bad timing.

Julia wasn’t buying it. “Alfred Barudsky. He shows your work, doesn’t he? I’m sure he’d be delighted to see you talking about it. Maybe we can get him to introduce the lecture. I’ll take everyone out to dinner afterward.”

“I’m cooking for them that night. It’s an old tradition.”

“Great. I’ll do the dishes.”

So somehow she was coming to dinner at his house after this, as well. She was a force of nature, a human flood. You could pile up the sandbags but they weren’t going to help.

I stood up from my desk after writing that passage, pleased and startled, feeling like I’d just met someone new, someone I liked, someone who was more than a match for my dyspeptic protagonist.

I’m looking forward to getting to know her better. That’s what gets me up to write at five o’clock every morning. It’s an eccentric system, but I suspect most working writers use some version of it.

Give it a try, I guarantee you’ll have more fun.

And so will your readers.

Voodoo Economics

2011-06-21T04:34:00.000-07:00

The Republicans have all the good catch phrases.

But one of the most revealing aspects of our new political "discourse" is that they have moved so far to the right that Democrats can now use their old catch-phrases against them. It was George H.W. Bush who coined the phrase, "Voodoo Economics" when he was running in the primaries against his future boss, Ronald Reagan ... who wound up raising taxes, by the way. And why? Because in the real world, when you cut taxes revenues drop.

That's because you have less money.

It's not calculus, or even algebra -- it's barely arithmetic; yet somehow today's Republicans still can't figure it out. Yesterday Illinois Repupblican Joe Walsh (His slogan could be "There Goes the Neighborhood") went on TV to say, and I quote, "Every time we've cut taxes, revenues have gone up."

Right. And every time I rob you, you get richer! So don't complain when I stick a gun in your ribs and empty your wallet --I've just increased your spending power.

Lucky you.

My question is, why do talking heads on television let people like Walsh get away with this brazen amoral mendacity? The proper follow-up question is: "Why do you think people will believe that lie -- and who's paying you to say it?"

But of course, the same people are paying the talking heads! That's why you have to read foreign newspapers and watch Al Jazeera English and the BBC news to find out what's going on in your own country.

But I wonder how extreme the Republican statements would have to become before someone (anyone) demurred. "Every time you jump off a building, you float up like a snowflake in the wind! Sometimes you go up one story ... sometimes two or three! That sepends on a lot of complex factors. You should read the heritage Foundation report on it. But this Democrat whining about 'Falling to your death' just makes me sick."

I wish Walsh had made that claim.

We could have asked him for a demonstration .

Scenes We'd Like to See #7: At the Publishing House

2011-04-05T12:59:00.001-07:00

It’s the big Tuesday afternoon acquisitions meeting, and the whole editorial department, editors and junior editors, have gathered around the big conference table to try and convince the Sales and Publicity department to buy Turns in the Wauwinet Road, a new novel by Desmond Harris, whose last novel Panacea failed to live up to the promise of his smash debut, the 2004 Bascomb Prize-winning The Virgins of West Fourth Street.

Turns has a number of strikes against it, from the point of view of the sales mandarins: it’s long, almost twice as long as the accepted length -- 200,000 words, or around 550 pages, even with wide margins and small print. Paper is expensive and this is the age of the 140 character tweet: no one wants to read a long book any more. Any exception the editorial staff wheels out – A Suitable Boy, Lonesone Dove, Infinite Jest, A Man in Full will be contemptuously dismantled as the one that proves the rule. Besides – Harris is no Vikram Seth, no Larry McMurtry , no David Foster Wallace … and especially no Tom Wolfe. His last book flopped! It didn’t even earn out its advance! It’s been a long time since Virgins, which only took off after the movie version, anyway. No one made a movie out of Panacea (Cancer victims touring the third world looking for folk remedies and witch doctors? Please.) No one is going to make this sappy romance into a movie, either. One of the editors, the new guy, Paul Antonowsky, jokes, “Right -- it’s Bridges of Madison County meets To The Lighthouse.” But the bean-counters have never heard of Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece and think the editor is talking about some travel book. It’s not worth trying to explain, especially since Seth Glazer (the irritable new editor in chief) is glaring at him: a stare cold enough to frost a magnum of champagne, which he doesn’t have and isn’t likely to need any time in the near future. But Antonowsky has already kicked over another rock and there are more sales-related problems squirming around under there.

Doug Cranepool, the Head of Distribution and Sales, sums it up:The book is fancy. It’s confusing. It’s full of flashbacks and flash forwards and a flashbacks inside flashforwards – or something. The sales team can’t figure it out. They can’t sell it. The woman is a chain-jerking bitch, the hero is a spineless wimp. “No one’s gonna wanta spend three weeks reading about this geek who spends twenty years chasing some one- night stand he should have dumped the morning after he met her.”

Then Carol Toscana starts talking. She loves the book. It made her laugh and cry – sometimes in the same sentence. “That’s what I’m saying.” Cranepool pounces. “It’s confusing. Make me laugh. Or make me cry, You do both at once I don’t know what the fuck is happening. Pardon my French.”

“I had no idea you spoke French,” Carol says.

Seth Glazer gives her the stare.

She tries another tack: “It’s a book club book. It’s an Oprah book.”

“There aren’t any Oprah books anymore. That train left the station a year ago.”

“Okay, okay, but I mean – it’s a book women will love and talk about and give to their friends.”

“But we want people to buy it, not share it around. This little doorstop is gonna have to sell fifty thousand copies just to break even. And that aint happening.”

This all feels very familiar. Every editor at the table has had a favorite project shot down by this same crass calculus; and some of them have seen the rejected novels and memoirs go on to be huge successes for rival publishers. But that doesn’t seem to diminish the power of these squinting, passionless little pessimists, who everyone suspects never actually read at all.

Still, something is different today and that something is Seth Glazer, a recent hire from some little University Press, an author of a book on writing called “Hear Yourself Think” and before that a beloved and embattled Professor of English literature at Brandeis. No one is quite sure how he got the job, but he’s managed to scare everyone in the editorial department and all the editors are hoping he’ll do the same for Sales. They’ve been waiting for a month, but he’s been in Europe, at the Frankfurt Book Fair among other places. This is first acquisitions meeting.

And the wait is over.

“That’s enough,” he says. “I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong track. We’re all a little confused about our jobs. So I’m going to clear that up for you. The people on this side of the table are the editorial department of this venerable publishing house. They read through the hundreds of agent submissions we get every year and choose a few titles they think are worthy to be published. To do this they exert the full force of minds shaped by decades of word besotted reading, and top flight liberal arts educations, their critical acumen sharpened by the composition of critical theses and Doctoral dissertations on books like To the Lighthouse, which, I should like to make clear at this juncture, is not a picture book guide to Coastal Cape Cod. In short: they pick the books. Your job, gentlemen is to sell the books they pick. You are salesmen. You are neither professors nor critics. You job is not to analyze or interpret. Your job is to move merchandise. This is not an MFA workshop. It’s a business. When you tell me ‘I can’t sell that book’ you are saying that you expect to fail. Well, I expect you to succeed. The paper in front of you details our spring list, including Turns in the Wauwinet Road -- all 200,000 confusing pages of it. Your mission is simple: go out and sell these titles to bookstores. If you can do that, you will be good salesman, and I’ll make sure you get handsome bonuses at the end of the year. If you can’t do that, you will prove to me that you are in fact BAD SALESMEN and you will be fired. That is all. Go out and do your jobs. And never ever again pretend for one moment that you can do mine.”

The sales staff, dazed and humbled, shuffle out of the room. The editors break into spontaneous applause. Maybe they’ll have some use for that magnum of champagne after all.

Mildred Pierce: Masterpiece in the Making

2011-04-05T12:23:00.001-07:00

The critical consensus on the Todd Haynes Mildred Pierce HBO miniseries that began on Sunday night (and continues for the next two weeks) is that it’s slow and plodding and unimaginatively faithful to a corny and old fashioned book. The critics unanimously prefer the 1945 movie, directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) and starring Joan Crawford (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?). The black and white film zips right along, they agree, not despite but because of the drastic changes wrought by Curtiz and a team of screenwriters that included an uncredited William Faulkner. They gutted the first half of the story and threw in a lurid murder to keep things moving. I guess they thought that Mildred’s story just wasn’t compelling enough to stand on its own, and today’s critics seem to agree.

For my money, they’re all wrong, all the way down the line.

I’ve only seen the first two parts, which take us about 125 pages into a roughly 300 page novel, but so far it’s spectacularly good, rigorously faithful to the James M. Cain novel yet visually gorgeous and flawlessly cinematic. There’s a general sense in Hollywood that being overly true to a n adapted book doesn’t work. Film versions of books as diverse as 1984 and The Great Gatsby and Sophie’s Choice seem to bear this out. But Cain was made for the movies. His dialogue snaps like a starched shirt in a stiff breeze. The blistering exchanges in the miniseries come directly from the book without one word altered. This exchange with Mildred’s neighbor Mrs Gessler, for instance, on the subject of Mildred’s recent divorce:

“I don’t know. I feel as though I’d picked his bones. First the kids, then his car, and now the house and -- everything he’s got.”

“Would you kindly tell me what good the house would do him? On the first call for interest he’d lose it, wouldn’t he?”

“But he looked so pitiful.”

“Baby, they all do. That’s what gets us.”

With her husband gone, Mildred needs a job and winds up working as a waitress. Her real skill is cooking – she sells pies and cakes out of her house. But she can’t make enough with small time catering to support her two children, Moire (called Ray) and Veda. Ray is a little spot of sunlight and the girl who plays her in the miniseries, Quinn McColgan, is fresh and funny and delightful She seems like an actual child, without the crust of precocious self-awareness that hinders so many other professional kids. Ray doesn’t even appear in the original film, so there’s no comparison to make in her case. But the rest of the cast shines in comparison to their predecessors. Guy Pearce as Monte Beragon makes his dissipated playboy both sad and glamorous in a way that Zahary Scott never managed. But of course the real casting coup of the new version is Kate Winslet.

Winslet is the opposite of Joan Crawford: where Crawford was cold, Winslet is warm; where Crawford was self-contained and calculating, you can see every emotion rising up inside Ms. Winslet and blooming on her face. You were a little scared of Joan Crawford; you fall in love with Kate Winslet -- and that makes all the difference.

This passion and transparency sharpens the scene where Veda confronts her mother about her job. Veda, a blithe arrogant little snob at age eleven, has given her mother’s waitress uniform to their house-keeper. The cruel, baiting justification: it couldn’t be Mildred’s, so why not give it away and put it to some use? They fight, Mildred spanks her, they both apologize and then you literally see the idea forming behind Winslet’s eyes, as Mildred realizes, in a dangerous flash of inspiration, the only way to win back Veda’s respect: she’ll start her own restaurant. Veda loves the idea; she knows there’s money there, and nothing else matters to her. Mildred is on a roll: she took the waitressing job to learn the business –- it’s research! And the funny thing is – she has learned the business. Watching Mildred become a skilled waitress has its own specific exhilaration. The second installment of the mini-series begins with her practicing the art of carrying four plates at once in her bedroom , her own plates weighed down with stones.

I hesitate to say more about the story itself, since despite the critical rap that the show is slow paced and uneventful, the first two hours feature a wild cascade of events, some thrilling, some tragic, with the highs and lows sometimes only moments apart. But events are just the superstructure, the rebar of plot. We care what happens to Mildred and her daughters because of the vivid characters, rendered through crackling dialogue, profoundly nuanced performances and meticulous direction. Todd Haynes shoots much of the movie through window glass or reflections in mirrors, keeping us at a crucial distance. We need to step away from the tragic parabola of Mildred’s life, it’s so much like our own – as lovers, as lonely divorced people, as parents, as workers struggling with an economy just like the one in the film. It’s eerily familiar that Mildred’s husband made and lost his fortune in a housing bubble grotesquely similar to our own.

We’re only two fifths of the way through the story. If Todd Haynes can maintain this level of passion and artistry and I suspect he can (Veda is about to grow up into a truly appalling Evan Rachel Wood), then HBO will be successful – Emmys for everyone -- and I’ll be happy. We’ll have a new version of record to replace the trashy Michael Curtiz version. And best of all -- James M. Cain would be proud.

Hate Month

2011-04-05T12:17:00.000-07:00

March is Hate Month on Nantucket – miserable weather and cranky people and not enough money and too much to do.

That’s fine with me. I hate everything these days. I’ve become a hater. Hate is the new love. Hate is the new black. I hate republicans, wholly owned by corporate interests, who make obscenely rich greed monsters richer, I hate the greed monsters and their spoiled children and overweight entitled friends who make waitresses cry when their steak is over-cooked. I hate the steaks themselves, even though I eat them, and the industrial cattle processing with its sick cows and antibiotics and its lake sized waste pools.

I hate the corporations who take the tops off of mountains and the corporate spokesmen who explain why It’s okay. I hate the drugs they advertise on television with their freakish lists of side-effects and the doctors who prescribe them and the druggists who sell them and the suckers who ask their doctors if Dipraximil “is right” for them. The price is right, that’s all that matters.

I hate Democrats who pretend to be better than Republicans, and then do the exact same stuff because they’re owned by the exact same people. I hate the stupid reality shows on television and the bad comedies and the jaded pukes who write and direct them, and the fools who watch them. I hate other people’s dogs, crapping on the sidewalk. I hate my dog crapping on the rug.

I hate stupid people who think they’re smart and dull people who think they’re interesting. I hate people who think they can write, and people who think they can sing and people who think they can drive. Newsflash: your stories are trite, your song is off key and you’re supposed to signal before you switch lanes and cut me off. I hate the cars choking every highway in the country and I drive one so I hate myself, too. But not enough to ride a bike.

I hate 24-hour cable news channels that can only tell one story a day. There was a tsunami in Japan, but there was also a 100,000 person rally in Madison Wisconsin yesterday. I hate Scott Walker, taking out his tax breaks on working people and Chris Christie doing the same thing and all other politicians working like wage slaves for the top 400. I hate the top four hundred individual people who own half the wealth of this country. Let’s just give it all to them and they can be Pharaohs, with a nation of slaves. We can build their pyramids.

I hate the South. I hate the bigots who wish they still had slavery, and the slimy rhetoric they use to cover that up. I hate the Supreme Court. I hate Scalia and his lapdog Clarence Thomas especially. I hate all branches of government now.

I hate cops and I hate criminals. I hate everyone who gets a perverted kick out of exercising any little trivial power they have over someone else. I hate insurance agents and DMV clerks and elementary school crossing guards. You don’t get a pass because you’re protecting the children, asshole . I hate the new religion of protecting the children. I hate the body armor they have to wear just to ride a bike. I hate new parents who think they did something special. You didn’t. You did the most ordinary thing on the face of the earth. I hate people abuse kids and people who neglect kids and people who brag about their kids and people who encourage their kids for doing nothing, “Oooo, what a good breath you took, Bobby! You’re the best breather in the whole world! You’re going to get a big gold breathing star and some cake!” I hate cake, and all the stuff that pretends not to be cake, like muffins. Muffins are cake. Corn bread is cake. Don’t eat it for breakfast. I hate eating. I hate the tyranny of it. We’re all addicts. “Oooo, if I don’t get more food I’ll die.” I hate grocery stores with that blood-sucking lighting and over air-conditioned climate control, and seeing all the people I don’t want to talk to in the vegetable aisle. I hate the industrial vegetables they sell and the waxed fruit. When was the last time you got a decent apple at the grocery?

I hate the seasons, and I especially hate the change of seasons. I hate daylight savings time. I just lost an hour of my life again. So I get it back in the fall? Who cares? Daylight Savings should be for those industrial farmers only. I hate winter, it’s cold and miserable. I hate summer just as miserable but hot. I hate spring -- it makes me want things I can’t have any more. I hate autumn -- it reminds me of death, and I hate death more than anything. I hate snow, it’s just about shoveling and trudging and watching little kids have fun and feeling old. I hate rain, it just means leaks and floods and water down your back and wet socks. I hate sunny days, too, Blue skies – is that really the only color they could come up with? Sunny days make me want to stay home from work and play; rainy days make me want to stay home from work and read in front of a fire. So I guess I hate work most of all. And I hate being lazy, but I don’t have the energy to change.

I even hate ranting about how much I hate everything. Hate is exhausting, I don’t know how all those ‘hate groups’ manage it. Hate is a full time job. The pay is terrible. No benefits. No overtime. No vacations. To hell with it. I quit.

I’ll start loving things again. I’ll start over, starting now. I’ll start with good coffee and some high speed internet.

We’ll see how long it lasts.

American Idol: The Good, The Bad and the Off-Key

2011-04-05T12:09:00.000-07:00

It was a long slog tonight on the 'big stage', with good singers choosing bad songs and bad singers making random noise that involved dramatic runs, emotive squinting and trite gestures. The gap is widening between the talented singers and the stage weight.

The nadir of the evening had to be Thia Megia sounding pathetically clueless, calling Carlie Chaplin Charlie "Chapman" and obviouslyhaving no idea who he was. He wrote the song you're singing, sweetie. He also happens to be one of the most significant figures in the history of film ... which does extend back before 1990.Tough to believe! But most of these kids have never even heard a Beatles tune. As far as her singing goes ...Thia has a pleasant, unremarkable voice. I can hear Simon snarling "Forgettable".

I'm writing on Wednesday night because I'm sure I'll forgotten most of these kids' performances by tomorrow morning.

The other losers -- Ashthon Jones, singing a tedious Diana Ross song in a dress so unflattering it belonged on the red carpet at some interminable awards show; Karen Rodriguez wheezing through an unintelligible Selena number, Pia Toscana singing some generic song in a generic dress looking generically pretty and bringing to mind e.e.cumming's famous adage, "The opposite of aesthetic is anesthetic.Pia was a major shot of novocaine last night ... which came in handy when listening to Stefano and Naima. Stefano sang a bad Stevie Wonder song, prancing around the stage with moves he must have learned by correspondence course; Naima was even more energetic but she seems to have learned the lyrics phonetically. She did make me appreciate the difficulty of singing and dancing at the same time -- a problem many professionals solve by lip-synching. Alas, Naima wasn't permitted this option.

I don't even know what Paul MacDonald did, or what he was singing, but it looked bizarre and sounded original, which is more than I can say for most of the other singers. The jury is still out on this oddball.

Lauren Alaina was fun, singing a throw-away Shania Twain song (She's really your favorite singer? That's tragic) and Haley covered a La Ann Rimes cover of a little known Patsy Cline tune. To her credit, she seemed to know that. She even knew who Patsy Cline was. Good for her.

Scotty Mcreery chose to perform a Garth Brooks dirge. Too bad because Garth Brooks is just bad -- or, not even bad, just boring and mediocre and over-rated. How about some George Jones next time, Scotty? Or Willie Nelson or Hank Williams? Or anyone other than Garth Brooks? That was a waste of talent, and unlike the judges, I sensed that Scotty felt uncomfortable up there for the first time.

Jacob Lusk sang a forgettable R Kelly song, with a full chorus. He's obviously a show favorite; and he's good, but he too needs better material.

The clear winners were Casey Abrams and James Durbin, both doing Beatles songs. Casey sang "A Little help from My Friends" and chaneled Joe Cocker, right down to the arm gestures. Durbin did McCartney and sounded great.

So ...an uneven group with a clear top six who need to find some decent songs next week. And the judges need to get tough. Even Iovine, who was supposed to be the imported hard-ass, has nothing but mild praise for everyone. It's sweet enough to put the average viewer into a diabetic coma. Simon Cowell was the insulin, and I need an IV drip after this love-fest.

Apparently the show wasn't live tonight. No one was 'ready', they said. Who cares? Some chaos and mistakes would have livened things up a little.

Go live, or go home.

Most of all don't lie about it. The kids struggled like professionals tonight.

The amateurs were behind the camera.

Trickle-Down Economics, the Weather Channel & Me

2011-04-05T12:07:00.001-07:00

It seems like a trivial matter, but the Weather Channel has changed it’s format: “Local on the Eights”, at least in my locality, has become “National on the Eights” with high tech graphics, glittery rhomboid flip screens, statistics about every city and section of the country … everything but the one thing I watch the Weather Channel to see: my local weather. Wind advisories, tide charts, sunrise and sunset times and what the chances are for a snow storm tomorrow. I have no idea why the geniuses at the Weather Channel made this change, though it seems to fit in with several general patterns: new is better, shiny video is more fun than information, and the problems and even the weather of any given small community just doesn’t really matter.

What really hit home, what made the issue seem so much more significant, was my response: I grumbled and complained and continued to watch. What was I supposed to do? Send an e-mail, write a letter to some monolithic media corporation owned by some other even more monolithic multinational corporation, and ask them to accommodate me? They have no interest in accommodating me. It’s a perfect metaphor , it sums up everything else, all the economic and political dead ends our country has built for itself since the end of World War II, when Dwight Eisenhower warned against the “military industrial complex”. Well, it’s the military-political-industrial-media complex now, with the same goals but with vastly more sophisticated tools at its command. I’m told to vote, but in my bones I know my vote means nothing and that even if I went in to politics and gave my liofe to the kind of change I long for, I would probably wind up like those Wisconsin Democrats, fleeing my own state to fight legislation I loathe and despise. Today I read that those brave legislators will soon return, the dreaded quorum will be achieved and Governor Scott Walker’s cruel, senseless union busting budget plan will be forced on the electorate of that bruised and battered state. And why? To solve a budget crisis? There would be no budget crisis if not for Walker’s scandalous tax cuts. But that’s the old voodoo economics, the trickle down hat trick: starve the beast. Suck the treasury dry with tax cuts then claim poverty and sacrifice the working poor to balance the budget. And this is no conspiracy, no secret plan hatched by a shadowy cabal in a back room. They brag about it!What did George Bush say at one of his fund raisers "The rich asnd the super rich ... or as I call them: my base."

The worst part is, I’m one of the few people in the nation who actually benefits from trickle down economics – these titans of economic fraud, these beneficiaries of global ponzi schemes, take their blackmail bailout money from the taxpayers and write themselves giant bonuses and spend the booty on – renovating their summer houses, among other indulgences. They hire me to paint the new kitchen and strip the floors of the new addition and so I find myself in the perverse position of rooting for them to stay wealthy and keep gutting the rest of the country. Supposedly 400 people have as much wealth and property as half of the rest of the population combined. What’s scarier than that statistic? Most of them summer on Nantucket.

And I make my living off of them. But my livelihood actually refutes the whole sleazy theory. These new hedge fund robber barons aren’t taking their ill-gotten gains and starting new businesses, and opening new factories and “innovating” and expanding the economy. They’re faux-painting the guest cabin on their new yacht. Like a dog’s favorite tree, I happen to be in the direct line of fire of that famous trickle. Everyone else just continues to suffer with the dead grass, the poisoned soil and the reek of waste.

In other eras, this kind of wanton savage greed eventually brought down corrupt regimes whether it was the court of the Russian Czar or Louis the 14th. . But those oligarchs were crude and inept. They didn’t have KFC and flat screen TVs and the NFL. They understood the “bread and circus’ concept but could never perfect it in practice. They had propaganda, but they didn’t have the ubiquitous media chorus big money can buy today. It seems like they may have finally created the thousand year Reich. Only the total collapse of the system, when there is no more tax money to bail out the next mindless orgy of naked avarice, or when the ecosystem collapses from limitless abuse can bring this power structure down, and the sad truth is, it will take all of us with it when it goes.

The only hope I can see is to outlaw political ads on television, as cigarette ads were outlawed so long ago. This would put a chisel into the works of a finely tuned mechanism: if politicians could be independent if they didn’t need the millions and millions and millions of dollars they spend on grotesque attack spots like this one:

“Steven Axelrod says he’d ‘blog for free’ but he accepts ‘tips’ and runs ads between his posts! What else is he lying about? Steven Axelrod: bad for Open Salon, bad for the Internet, Bad for America. I’m anonmyous and I approved this ad.”

Without the cash sucking black hole of televion attack ads, politicians could campaign the old fashioned way and govern the country according to their actual beliefs and the needs of their constituents, not the whims of the Proprietors who hold the wallet and the remote.

But that will never happen. So I’ll just continue to scribble the occasional rant here, and watch the Weather Channel. It’s scary out there – lots of floods and hurricanes and tornadoes. Thank goodness for Jim Cantore and the gang. I have no idea what the humidity or the temperature is on Nantucket this morning, but it’s 56 degrees in Detroit and there’s a chance of rain in Atlanta.

I guess I’ll have to settle for that.

American Idol: The Danger of Nice

2011-03-06T08:24:00.000-08:00

It’s great for Robbie Rosen and Thia Megia and Stefano Langone and most of the other top 24 contestants on American Idol this season that the judges are so cuddly and generous and nice. It’s good for their parents, who must be so proud! It’s good for their home towns and their high schools and their friends and their teachers. It maybe even be good for ratings. But it’s not good for me, and it’s not good for any discerning viewer over the age of twelve. It may not be the show’s fault directly that so little real originality was on view this week – maybe America has just drained its talent pool. Or perhaps a whole generation of kids has grown up watching the show and groomed themselves –without even knowing it – to sound like the songbots of pervious years. I watched all the good looking., bland banal girls hitting their duly appointed high notes last night, and making their approved performance gestures (throw head back, arms up in the air, reach out to the judges), and started to nod off. The mental dissonance began when Tyler and Lopez lavished praise on these competent but mediocre singers. They reminded me of an indulgent aunt Minnie and uncle Max after a high school production of “Hello Dolly”. “You were wonderful, darling. You remembered all the words!” My own hometown high school ‘stars’ occasionally make the trek to New York and get the caustic wake-up call when they go to their first audition and everyone there was the star of their own high school’s drama club or glee club and everyone is more talented and better looking than they are. The hometown bubble of praise pops pretty fast.

Now for some reason, Lopez and Tyler are trying to create that same delusional sealed chamber where no germ of reality can invade and infect the young egos on parade. Well, here’s what a New York casting director – or the much missed Simon Cowell – would say: “That was dreadful. I could have heard that level of singing at karaoke bar in America. That wads cruise ship performance.” Or, my favorite Cowell-ism, ever: “If it was a thousand years ago, they would have stoned you to death.”

It’s all very dispiriting. That Randy Jackson has become the critical hard-ass of the panel tells the whole story. I understand that the stars remember their own struggles and want to ease the path for the kids. But that doesn’t work and good intentions backfire when they run headfirst into the cinder block wall of reality. No matter how nice J-Lo is to these hapless children, half of them are going home tonight, and it’s for the best.

But Randy’s constant theme, that the singer lack originality, leads me back to the few glints of hope that showed through the cracks of poor song choices and abrasive band music this week. There actually are some original talents on view this year – enough for a top five or six. Part of what made them look good was the music they worked with. Most of the kids picked tuneless, cliché ridden songs that could have been produced on the Versificator – the Ministry of Truth song writing machine in George Orwell’s 1984 that recombines musical and lyrical boilerplate to churn out popular songs for the proles.

So without further ado, here are the paltry few authentic talents to watch this year, if you have the grit to endure all the over-hyped tedium.

Jacob Lusk – bald, black, overweight, with a fabulous voice and bizarre speech impediment and enough soul for the whole season. He may be this year’s Ruben Studdard.

Scotty McCreery – He may look like Alfred E, Newman, but he sings like Johnny Cash. His compelling bass voice is charged with something rare on Idol: he seems to actually understand the lyrics.

That’s it for the guys, so far, though my jury is still out on a couple of them (Paul McDonald, Casey Abrams, Clint Gun Jamboa).

Three girls made my cut:

Lauren Alaina – she’s sixteen and looks forty, which is bizrarre. But she’s alive on stage and she’s fun to watch – a high priority in the sleepwalking arena presided over by an increasingly desperate and chirtpy Ryan Seacrest.

Lauren Turner – she’s the only girl on the show not picked at least in part for her looks. But she teaches the same lesson we’ve learned from singers as diverse as Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin and Idol’s own Fantasia Barrino: the voice – and the personality behind it – are all that matters.

Finally my favorite –

Haley Reinhart: She has a real singer’s voice with a seductive growl in the lower registers, she can move on stage without resembling a marionette, and she has heart. She feels the song and manages to put that connection across so you feel it, too. She could win it all – this year’s Crystal Bowersox. Or she could be eliminated tonight. That happens on American Idol all the time – the most talented kids get voted off in favor of someone who appeals to twelve year olds in Kansas.

Oh well – at least there’s a few people to root for this year. The show lives and dies by the talent it manages to unearth. That they discovered five good singers this year is an accomplishment all by itself.

Last year they only found one.

Sigh.

Illuminated Manuscripts: The Survival of Print

2011-03-06T08:22:00.000-08:00

I dreamed I was reading a book last night.

I mean, an actual book, with creamy linen pages and some gorgeous type-face (not a font!) -- Century Schoolbook? Garamond? -- inked deeply into the grain. The cracked leather cover and the silk endpapers made me think of some other lifetime, some other world, but the smell of the hand-stitched binding was straight out of my childhood: old summer houses on rainy August afternoons. The book was Huckleberry Finn. After reading an essay discussing Twain’s masterpiece on the Numero Cinq website the day before, I had downloaded a copy to my Nook, to refresh my memory. Just ninety nine cents! But in my dream it was an actual tome I was reading. I liked the weight of it on my chest, I liked the rough edges (I had to cut them myself). I liked the act of turning each page, the rustle of the paper in the quiet room. It was like dreaming about a lost lover. I woke up with intense feelings of nostalgia and loss.

I’ve definitely been reading e-books for too long. And it’s only been six months.

Perhaps my dream had another source: my daughter Caity called me yesterday. I gave her a Nook for Christmas, loaded with Admission, by Jean Hanff Korelitz, among other books. I had bought the novel -- about a Princeton admission officer whose child, given up for adoption, is applying to the school – and gave it away to one of my mother’s friends, who was on-island for Mom’s 90th birthday celebration. I downloaded the book onto my Kindle and kept reading: a win-win … for me, for my Mom’s friend, and – most importantly -- for Ms. Korelitz and her publisher. Caity is reading the book now, and wants to share it with one of her friends. She’s frustrated. You can share a book on an e-reader, if your friend happens to have a compatible e-reader (not a Kobo or a Sony, in this case) … but it’s not the same. I’ve read articles recently mourning the death of the book, stalwart of western culture since Guttenberg, imagining worst-case scenarios where whole libraries could be deleted from internet servers, never to be seen again. Those paranoid fantasies seemed a little far-fetched, but I wasn’t sure why.

Now I understand.

Publishing has always been sustained by people who love books, That seems obvious, but there’s a whole population of book consumers who care only for story, for the what-happens-next, chomp-chomp, pac-man consumption of plot. I read the books written for that audience – okay, fine, I am that audience. But I don’t need the novels of Michael Connelly, Lee Child, and Stephen Hunter (to name the elite), physical slabs of paper and glue and cardboard, cluttering up my house. Their books are fun, but let’s face it -- ultimately, they’re disposable. The Kindle and Nook, the Kobo and iPad will save many trees, as thriller consumers switch to digital reading machines.

But there are other books, novels written for people who love sentences and paragraphs, characters and settings, every bit as much as the enjoy the comfortable machinery of plot. Books like Huckleberry Finn, and books like Admission. I wasn’t sure what to tell Caity about her e-book lending problem, but thinking about a similar moment in my own life clarified things for me. I loaned out my hardcover copy of The Short History of the Dead, by Kevin Brockmeier to my sister-in-law on the same day that I downloaded Brockmeier’s new novel The Illumination onto my Nook. It was a seemingly trivial coincidence, and it sparked a minor epiphany. I realized that I would probably love The Illumination as much as I had loved the last novel, as much as I loved Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Which I just finished reading on my Kindle), and because I loved those books I would always want to possess them physically, as I had possessed Twain’s book in my dream, and watch their pages oxydize over time, and stare at them on my shelves, and pull them down to look up some line for an essay or an argument, and lend them out to my friends, without permission from anyone, including Amazon.com.

Book lovers love the precious objects, the hand-made artifacts themselves. That’s what will rescue and preserve realm of print. I will buy copies of the books I love just to hold them in my hand, and so will my daughter and so will all the millions of people just like us who have kept the sublime fetish of the physical book alive since Celtic monks created the first illuminated a manuscript, twelve hundred years ago.

The best part? It’s a capitalist dream of avarice – people buying more books, not less, enriching writers and publishers and flooding the world with text, with images and characters and situations evoked by unique sensibilities, in every format imaginable, forever.

It sounds like Utopia, to me (And I just downloaded it for free on my Kindle: Utopia, by Saint Thomas More). The best of all possible worlds! (I just downloaded Candide, also – 99 cents!).

Volaire might say I sound a little too much like Pangloss, but time will tell.

Joe Turner, Nigger Jim And the "N" Word

2011-03-06T08:20:00.000-08:00

This morning in The New York Times, I read that a Connecticut high school's production of August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone may be cncelled because the characters use the "N" word. This comes directly on the heels of a new edition of Huckleberry Finn, which changes the word to "slave" Of course, Jim isn't a slave. That's the whole point. But in the headlong rush to offend no one, minor issuies like sense and style don't matter.

I had my own run-in with this absurd form of cultural dementia several years ago. The Theater Workshopof Nantucket was putting on an 'armchair theater' version of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, another drama in which the word 'nigger' appears often -- this time spoken by white racists as a hateful epithet, rather than by African Americans as a term of endearment, as in the Wilson play. I refused to go along with the proposed revisions. A farcical bit of cultural warfare ensued, and a mousy young woman who watched the whole fracas went home and wrote an outraged letter to the local paper, calling me a racist.

My reply:

To the Editors:

I have to respond to Martina Morrow’s letter in your February 10th issue, in which she refers to “A man fighting with an African American woman because she felt uncomfortable with him using racially derogatory words.”

The man was me. The comment is totally out of con text and deceptive. It’s worth discussing because Ms. Morrow’s response represents so much of what is wrong in America today – the liberal guilt and “politically correct” thinking that allowed – among other outrages -- the elevation of Clarence Thomas to the position of Supreme Court Justice nine years ago.

The incident in question took place during a rehearsal for an arm-chair theatre reading of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. This play takes place in the deep south one hundred years ago. The characters – almost without exception hateful, selfish and venal – use the terminology common to their time and place. This includes the “N” word that Ms. Morrow refers to. In the midst of the reading, an African American woman in the cast informed the director and everyone else that she would not tolerate such language “in this day and age”. The fact that the language she objected to actually defined despicable characters as evil did not register with her. She sat for a few minutes allowing various cast members to suggest alternatives which ranged from “negroes” to “workers”. I finally asked her what her suggestion might be. “Black would be acceptable,” she said. I mentioned that the word was not even in use in 1900, and indeed would have been considered insulting at that point in time. “Then we should do a different play,” she answered.

The incipient fascism of this comment startled me, but I said nothing. I didn’t ask what plays she would find acceptable, or what punishments she would favor for those who violated her ideas of proper expression. Clearly everyone else in the room – including Ms. Morrow – was intimidated. They did not want to seem racist. When Clarence Thomas called the confirmation hearings a “lynching”, the white Senators had much the same reaction, and refused to call the other women who were more than willing to verify Anita Hill’s accusations.

“We’ll use the term black,” the director told us, and so the reading began.

Half way into the third act I had a speech, which included the “N” word. So I said it. I didn’t say it because I’m racist. I said it because I respect the text. As actors, that is our first obligation. But I also said it because Lillian Hellman once declared, “I will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions” and I knew she would be appalled by our capitulation to this bully.

The lady was furious. Despite the fact that the director assured her that her revision of the play would stand, she stalked out in self-righteous fury. She did not leave that room because there were racists present. She left because someone disagreed with her.

In a small New England town we have reached the point where it is forbidden to argue with an African American woman. That’s unfortunate, because in this case the African American woman was wrong.

But the fault doesn’t lie with her. The fault lies with our educational system, which allows and even fosters such ignorance. One can’t help thinking of Huckleberry Finn and the efforts to ban that book from public schools all across America. Why? Because Huck’s friend was referred to as “Nigger Jim”. So the first full-blooded and complex black character in our whole literature was banished from our school libraries because of an offensive word.

That is the true racism.

I was fighting it that night, and I will continue to do so.

Ms. Morrow – despite her good intentions -- cannot make the same statement. She’s part of the problem and she has no idea why, any more than Senators Joseph Biden and Arlen Specter did in the Clarence Thomas hearings.

And that’s the real tragedy of this incident.

Nothing has changed since I wrote that letter. While school boards twist themselves into knots about performing a classic American play, "Birthers" who hate Obama for the color of his skin (not the content of his character) continue their crussade, and the anniversary of the the South's treasonous attempt at seccession is celebrated like the Fourth Of July, south of the Mason Dixon line.

I say perform August Wilson and Lillian Hellman, use the word niggerand over-use it, until we sueeze the poison out of it and we can stop posturing and treat each other as the flawed hapless striving primates that we are. That process begins by looking at the things we've done and the words we use, and not looking away.

Then, if possible, let's try to act as Huck does , even though he's been told that helping a nigger will ensure his eternal damnation:

I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
"All right, then, I'll GO to hell."

I hope I'd have the guts to follow you, Huck.

I don't think your new editor would, and I doubt the members of the Waterbury Connecticut Board of Education would, either.

As Huck says, "It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race."

American Idol, Ten Years Later

2011-03-06T08:18:00.000-08:00

I’ve spent the better part of a decade defending American Idol. At first, I described it as a ‘guilty pleasure’, but I soon realized there was nothing to be guilty about. With the tenth season about to begin, it struck me as a good moment to explain just what has kept me watching it, all these years.

There were only six kids left in the competition when I discovered American Idol in the summer of 2002, towards the end of the first season. I happened on the show by chance, clicking through the channels on a sluggish Tuesday night. There wasn’t much else to watch and the show – a charmingly modest, almost amateurish effort, by comparison with the current version – had certain obvious assets. The judges, affable insider Randy Jackson, drugged out, effusive nutcase Paula Abdul, and brutally honest Simon Cowell, were fun to watch. I carry their voices in my head and amuse myself to this day with the tribunal’s critique of my daily life.

This post for instance:

Randy: Yo, Dawg. How you doin? You stepped out of your comfort zone here, but It wasn’t the right subject matter for you. It got a little grammar-y at the end. So I dunno, it was just a’ight for me.

Paula: First of all I love your font! It’s just gorgeous. And your spelling is perfect as always. I don’t care what Randy syyays, I loved it. So witty and articulate! You have star quality! I love what you do. Just go on, be strong be yourself! You could win this whole competition. The post of the night! (throws a kiss)

Simon: Well. That was effusive. I’m not taking any psychotropic drugs so this will be rather more honest. Do you have a writing teacher? Fire him. I could see a screed like this in any tatty blog on the internet. It reminded me of that awful toast at your cousin’s wedding when the fat uncle refuses to shut up. If this was a thousand years ago, we’d have stoned you to death. You don’t have a chance in this competition. Sorry.

There’s a lot of what initially drew me to the show in that imaginary exchange – Randy’s stolid honesty, Simon’s snide flirtation with Paula and his ongoing merciless attack on the mediocre, his comments always capped with the most insincere apologies ever uttered on network television; Paula’s loose canon craziness that no one could have scripted.

Beyond the judges, the kids were talented. Kelly Clarkson won that year, but Tamyra Gray, eliminated in the round of four, was just as good, if not better. It struck me that summer, and I still feel this way, that American Idol, far more than Survivor, say or Undercover Boss or The Bachelor, is an authentic example of reality TV: real kids, singing real songs to an audience of millions of other kids, who vote on what they like: that’s it.

My son once dismissed the show as ‘rigged’—I said, yeah, by the human genome. And a healthy collective dose of raging hormones. Generally speaking the talented kids do better than the untalented ones, and the audience notices. During seasons three and four, you could tell the ultimate winners -- Fantasia Barrino and Carrie Underwood, respectively -- after just a few weeks.

Nor was I alone in that perception, the voting was so massively skewed for Underwood that the show would have lost all suspense if the actual numbers (always top secret) had leaked out. Unlike the bizarre contrivances of other such programs – (random weird contests in deserted places, a dozen women chasing one rich guy, or a boss going undercover at his own business … no one noticed the camera crew, I guess) American Idol has a simplicity that dates back to Ted Mack’s Amateur hour, not much different from the open mike night at a local club, or the high school talent shows kids have enjoyed, or sat through with gritted teeth, for generations.

This simplicity is the show’s strength. You get to meet a group of young talented strangers and have the pleasure of matching wits, sophistication and taste with a trio of judges on the merits of their performances. That’s it; except for the suspense of seeing the final verdict delivered by a massive, anonymous audience of shrieking kids, most of them fourteen year old girls. The video that went viral a few years ago of audience members responding to David Archuleta’s loss to the more sedate and mature David Cook gives you some idea of what the show has to deal with every week. I can't embed it, but check this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg_p3Ji2bWU&feature=related

That audience has made some bizarre choices and some good ones, but I have never crossed over to the dark side and voted myself.

I just watch.

And what I’ve seen over the years has taught me a few things: you can be delusional about something as seemingly objective as music. The better you are, the less you need to do. And the worse you are, the more arrogant you sound. It’s interesting, this last point. You could string the sound bites together – the most atrocious singers swearing they were going to have huge careers and promising to snub Simon when they succeed; the winners all quietly humble and self-effacing. David Cook just showed up to keep his brother company. Crystal Bowersox, last year’s runner-up, had been busking a few months before, and wouldn’t have been surprised – or even that disappointed -- to be back singing in the subway again, with her guitar case open on the platform.

Judges come and go – we’ll all miss Simon Cowell, but the heart of the show remains watching talented kids develop over the course of a season, and to see the best of them succeed. The show stays fresh because there are always new kids trying out, chasing the dream. Some are brilliant, some are mediocre; some are charming some are annoying. But all of them are hard working and ambitious and strangely innocent in a cynical world, as is the show itself despite all its self-hype and product placement.

Every year I stumble out of the football season (that ultimate reality TV show), and ease into the gentler competition of American Idol, with the same spark of interest, the same renewed hope: this year I’ll discover someone extraordinary – another Jennifer Hudson, another Adam Lambert—and more often than not, it actually happens.

Will some spectacular new talent emerge this year? Like 24 million other people, of all ages and backgrounds, I’ll be tuned into this cheesy but compelling American institution, I’ll be watching and cringing, occasionally cheering, always hoping, always looking for the real thrill you get from a real talent coming into its own.

That’s reality. And that’s TV. And that combination still draws me back, no longer apologizing, ten years later.

Dennis Lehane: Hardboiled and Humane

2011-01-16T07:08:00.001-08:00

Dennis LeHane has finally published what will almost certainly be the last of his beloved Kenzie-Gennaro detective novels. In honor of the occasion (and to test drive my new Kindle) I downloaded all six, and read them in order, from A Drink Before the War, Darkness Take My Hand and Sacred to Gone Baby Gone, Prayers for Rain and the most recent one, Moonlight Mile. The books have a strong through-line and this was the ideal way to experience them: as a single, self-contained 1800 page morality play, love story, heroic quest and gritty noir procedural combined into one overarching, poignant, harrowing and beautifully sustained narrative.

In short: a masterpiece.

The books are probably most familiar to the public from the movie version of Gone, Baby Gone, which was a strong and admirably faithful rendition of the source material, perfectly cast and unflinching. LeHane has been treated well by Hollywood: Mystic River turned out well and even Shutter Island – a second rate book to begin with – received a pitch perfect second rate film treatment. You couldn’t really ask for more than that.

LeHane has also written historical fiction and short stories – even a play. He worked as a writer on HBO’s classic series The Wire. But for the moment at least, it’s safe to say he’ll be best remembered at the creator of Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro.

When we first meet them in A Drink Befrore the War (1994), they’re friends and colleagues, running a low-life detective agency out of the abandoned belfry of a Dorchester church. Beyond any of the cases they work on, or the dangers and corruption they encounter, the real tension in the novel comes from the fact that Patrick has been in love with Angie since high school, and she’s married to his best friend. Phil Dimassi is an abusive drunk and Angie often comes to work bearing the wounds and bruises of her ill-fated marriage. Patrick understands that toxic combination of love and rage: his own father, a fireman he always refers to as The Hero, once burned him with a steam iron in a fit of rage, and Patrick still wears the disfiguring scars on his abdomen. He and Angie come from a brutal world, and they stick with the friends who grew up with them in that urban jungle: columnist Richie Colgan, hard nosed cop Devin Amronklin and e-Marine and arms dealer Bubba Rugowski, whom Patrick describes this way:

…an absolute anachronism in these times--he hates everything and everybody except Angie and myself, but unlike others of similar inclination, he doesn't waste any time thinking about it. He doesn't write letters to the editor or hate mail to the president, he doesn't form groups or stage marches or consider his hate as anything other than a completely natural aspect of his world, like breathing or the shot glass. Bubba has all the self-awareness of a carburetor and takes even less notice of anyone else--unless they get in his way. He's six feet four inches, 235 pounds of raw adrenaline and disassociated anger. And he'd shoot anyone who blinked at me the wrong way.

Bubba is a handy guy to have around when things get violent and in Patrick’s world that happens a lot. A blackmailed politician leads Patrick and Angie into the midst of a particularly horrible gang war in this first novel, an ominously familiar battle between father and son for the control of the local drug trade. It turns out that Marion Socia pimped his son Roland out as a prostitute many years ago, and photographs of him with the politician spark the action of the novel, which ends with Kenzie killing Roland in self-defense – a moment of projected oedipal violence that you know has to resonate horribly inside him. The worst Patrick did himself was refuse to take his father’s hand, in the moments before the old man died.

The horror strikes even closer to home in the second book, Darkness Take My Hand, where the search for a serial killer leads into the heart of the old neighborhood, and a beloved local character turns out to be an authentic monster, murdering children, dismembering adults and at the end of the book, killing Angie’s husband and mutilating Patrick with a straight razor. This is the most intense and traumatic of the novels, and though Patrick and Angie wind up together at the end, both of them are wounded and grieving.

Sacred is the slightest of the books, an appropriate breather at the midpoint of the series. Despite its murderous religious cult, scheming femme fatale and tanker full of heroin, it remains a relatively routine story, burnished by the pleasure of seeing Patrick and Angie living and working together as a couple. The idyll doesn’t last long.

In the most well known installment of their story, Gone, Baby Gone, Kenzie and Gennaro set out to find kidnapped four year old Amanda McCready. Her mother Helene is possibly the worst parent of all time, neglectful category, leaving the baby alone whole she goes out drinking. Her sister Bea hires the detectives and the case follows a long tortured course involving drug deals gone bad crooked cops, local gangsters and a ring of psychotic child molesters. Kenzie and Gennaro find corruption and murder, they find scraps of a little girl’s life in a deserted quarry. But they don’t find the little girl.

Turns out she was kidnapped by a couple who make a avocation of creating healthy loving homes for abandoned and abused children. The problem – for Patrick at least – is that they do this wholly outside the law, with no oversight from the authorities. So yeah – they’re kidnappers: kidnappers who enforce nap-time and make sure the vaccinations are up to date, who read kids to sleep and help with their homework. “Eat your vegetables” is not a line one associates with child-napping sociopaths. Patrick wants to return Andrea to her mother, however inept or drug addled she may be. He can’t endorse a world where anyone can just grab a kid if they think the parent is doing a bad job. Angie wants to leave the little girl with her new parents. Both sides of this difficult issue have merit, but the conflict tears Patrick and Angie apart. Patrick wins: Andrea goes home. But he loses Angie over the case and winds up alone and the book reaches its dark and bitter conclusion: you can do the right thing and be dead wrong, and pay the consequences forever.

Near the end of the book, Patrick is invited to an all-cop ‘touch’ football game – Homicide Robbery versus Narcotics/Vice. He gets pounded and threatened by Remy Brussard, one of the policemen involved with the case, Later it turns out that Brussard faked the kidnapping to get Amanda into a loving home … and of course, to steal the ransom money for himself. He’s a dangerous thug, perfectly willing to kill to cover up his crimes; Patrick winds up killing him in a shoot-out a little later on.

I sketch this in to set up the following fragment of LeHane’s prose, which I think gives a good sense of how beautifully he writes these books, sentence by sentence:

We won by a field goal.

As a guy who grew up as desperate to be a jock as any other guy in America, and one who still cancels most engagements on autumn Sunday afternoons, I suppose I should have been ecstatic at what would probably have been my last taste of team sports, the thrill of conquest and the sexual intensity of the battle. I should have felt like whooping, should have had tears in my eyes as I stood at midfield in the first football stadium ever built in this country, looked at the Greek columns and he rain boiling off the long planks of seating in the stands, smelled the last hint of winter dying in the April rain, the metallic odor of the rain itself, the lonely advance of evening in the cold purple sky.

But I didn’t feel any of that.

I felt like we were a bunch of foolish pathetic men unwilling to accept our own aging and willing to break bones and tear the flesh of other men just so we could move a brown ball a couple of yards or inches down a field.

And also, looking along the sidelines at Remy Brussard as he poured a beer over his bloody finger, doused his torn lip with it, and accepted high fives from his pals, I felt afraid.

As Prayers For Rain begins, Patrick Kenzie has become a regret-addled solo act, missing Angie, who has gone to work for a corporate detective agency and left him on his own. His regrets multiply when he fails to take a phone call from a client who’d been harassed by a crazy guy that Patrick and Bubba scared off. Easy work: Bubba is good at scaring people. Taking off for vacation, Patrick figured he could touch base with the girl when he got back from Bermuda. But by then she was dead, a suicide victim who threw herself off a tall building downtown. The effort to prove her death wasn’t suicide leads Patrick into the twisted world of a sociopath who destroys people for fun. He doesn’t kill them, but rather takes everything away from them, ransacking and vandalizing their lives until they wish they were dead. The investigation reveals layer upon layer of festering family secrets, guilts and grudges going back decades. It comes to head in an underground bunker, with Bubba leading the way into battle. The villain is revealed, but he laughs when Patrick admits that he could never win at chess because he could never “see the whole board”. He finally does grasp the big picture, of course, but it takes several months for him to do it. When he lifts the rock on that last squirming nest of family dysfunction and walks away, he goes home with Angie and we leave them happily in love, wounded but standing tall, together at last, ready for new dventures.

It seemed that LeHane was finished with Patrick and Angie at that point. He left them to themselves for more than ten years, moving on to other projects, including the sweeping historical epic The Given Day. But the conclusion of the series felt inconclusive, somehow: would Patrick and Angie keep working together? Quit and start a family? Break up? Whatever may or may not have been kicking around in LeHane’s head, the series was just five books about the same two people at that point, a typical detective franchise, cut short and left dangling.

LeHane must have felt the urge to tie things up and finish the story, because he has done it now, with style and conviction.

Moonlight Mile invokes the past: Andrea McCready has gone missing again. She's sixteen now, tough and self-contained, with a hard carapace from living all those years with her drug addict mother. Now she's involved with the Russian mob, trying to save her friend's baby from child trafficking and a particulatrly loathesome crime lord and his psychotic wife. The boss wants the baby back -- as well as a hugely valuable stolen antiquity: the Belarus cross. Fortunately, his immensely dangerous Capo, one Yefim, winds up on the side of the angels. He wants the boss killed as much as everyone else and turns on him in a crucial moment saving everyone's lives and assuring a much more sane and intelligent criminal empire, with himself running things. Yefim likes Patrick, finds him smart and amusing, and we can't help liking Yefim, crazy as he is ... although we know he would have killed Patrick and everyone else we have come to care about if it suited his plans. Horrible enemy -- bizarre jovial ally. A strange combination, replete with Lehane's signature moral ambiguity, clapping Patrick on the back in a room full of corpses, offering him stolen blu-ray players and kindles (Patrick turns down the kindle; the blu-ray he gives to Amanda). Parick finds himself oddly detached, considering the murders he's just witnessed -- tribute to the shit he's been swimming through for so many years. And just like that, he decides to quit the life.

He calls Angie and his daughter -- whom he had sent to her mother's house down south, to hide from the trigger-happy mobsters. He throws his 45. into the Charles and tells her the news.

Let's eavesdrop:

"Know what it is, babe?" I looked back at the trailer. "When you start out doing this, you think it's just the truly horrible shit that's going to get you -- that poor little boy in the bath tub back in '98, what happened in Gary Glynn's bar. Christ, that bunker in Plymouth ..." I took a breath, let it out slowly. "But it's not those moments. It's the little ones. It's not that people fuck each other over for a million dollars that depresses me, it's that they do it for ten. I don't gve a shit anymore whether so-and-so's wife is cheating on him, because he probably deserved it. And all those insurance companies? I help them prove a guy's faking his neck injury, they turn and drop coverage on half the neighborhood when ythe recession hits. The last three years, every time I sit on the corner of the mattress to put my shoes on in the morning, I want to crawl back into bed. I don't want to go out there and do what I do."

"But you've done a lot of good. You know that, don't you?"

I didn't.

"You have," she said. "Everyone I know lies, breaks their word, and has perfectly legitimate reasons for why they do. Except you. Have you noticed that? Two times in twelve years, you said you'd find this girl no matter what. And you did. Why? Because you gave your word, babe. And that might not mean shit to the rest of the world, but it means everything to you. Whatever else happened today, you found her twice, Patrick. No one else would even try."

And that's what sets these books apart, as we come to the final chapter: the violence and trauma these two people see, and suffer (and occasionally inflict) affects them. It wears them down, wounds them, leaves scars that won't heal. That's just not true of other crime fiction heroes. Joe Pike and Jack Reacher soldier on; so do Elvis Cole and Harry Bosch and all the others. Patrick and Angie feel the pain of the world they live in, and allow themselves to be tormented by the tragedies they investigate. They're real people and they wind up doing what real people -- what any young couple with a toddler -- would really do: walk away, take that boring job, go back to school, start living like civilians -- just start living.

It means there won't be any more books about them, but I'm happy to see them go, to see them start over, and I wish them good luck. Lehane has brought them to that rarest of moments: a satisfactory conclusion, a happy ending, a new beginning. And in the process he has created a startlingly bulky (amost 2000 pages!), but graceful, suspenseful, lightfooted and big hearted novel of Boston and its people.

I can't wait to see what he'll do next.

Reading the E-Readers, Part Two: The Nook Color

2011-01-16T07:06:00.001-08:00

Barnes and Noble just released their sales figures for the year and e-books outsold paper ones on their website for the first time. Real books are still outselling the digital variety at the actual stores, I assume – though you can both buy and read books for free on your Nook e-reader at any Barnes and Noble ‘brick and mortar’ outlet. That’s convenient for me, because I got a Nook Color for Christmas … as well as an elegant leather cover (with attached reading light) for my Kindle.

I’d like to say “Game on!”, but for me at least, it’s game over.

The Nook color wins on almost every count, so let me get the problems and quibbles out of the way first. The primary liability is price. The thing costs two hundred and fifty dollars. It’s half of what an iPad will set you back, but more than a hundred dollars more than the Kindle. Around now you may be thinking to yourself – you, an internet junkie scanning Open Salon with your morning coffee, no Luddite, no “I-liked-rotary-dial-telephones-and-why-is-the-good-version-of-anything-called-‘analog’” crank …you're cool, you're hip, you're modern ... but you're still thinking … WTF?? Why should I pay 250 bucks to read a buck I can get for free at the library? Or for a dime at the yard sale? Well, in answer to that shrewd piece of economic skepticism … I got nothing. Except … maybe you’re reading the wrong blog post. There are some excellent recipes and family dramas on the home page, some insightful political coverage (Someone even explains Auld Lang Syne!). Enjoy.

This post is for reading geeks who like cool new toys. I mean, pause a second and look at it from our point of view. We don’t particularly like cars, or guns, or fancy clothes, or even high end cooking stuff like pasta makers and ‘mandolins’. We don’t play an instrument, either (most of us) so an actual mandolin wouldn’t be much better. Our hobby, our escape, our primary source of fun, has always been associated with the smell of oxidizing paper, dusty leather and the sickly, soiled-aquarium light from library fluorescents. Our idea of a new development was the trade paperback. Some of us were pleased about ‘big print’ editions. (Or so I’ve heard).

But those days are over.

Now we have something cool to call our own.

But I was listing the drawbacks, so let’s move quickly here. The touch screen is perhaps too sensitive. It reminds me of a dog, sitting net to the couch while you eat a left-over slice of pumpkin pie, alert to every movement, following your arm like the ball in a Wimbledon Final. At any stray brush of the screen and it wants to know if you’d like to change settings, bookmark something, create a note, change the font size, check the table of contents. It’s irritating, but you learn how to deal with the touch sensitive screen after a week or two. What else? It needs to be charged much more often than the Kindle. But there are good reasons for this. It does so much more, so lavishly; Adrian Peterson probably eats more than the average toll booth attendant, but he manages to burn those calories, somehow (See, Vikings Vs. Esgles, 12/28./10).

One actual complaint: the Nook offers a plastic sheet to cover the back-lit screen and prtect it from glare, as well as dust and scratching. Sounds good, but it feels half-baked in practice. They tell you to meticulously clean the screen with the provided, color-matched cloth, before applying the wonder plastic. If you fail at this first step, air bubbles will appear. Well, you could have OCD and spend the better part of a day cleaning your Nook in an hermetically sealed room, and there would still be air bubbles between the plastic and the screen. You barely notice them … but if you’re the obsessive type who really cleaned the Nook in the first place, that won’t be much comfort. I’m waiting for glare-proof plastic 2.0. I suggest you do the same. If I want to read in broad daylight (usually I’m doing other things when I’m outside on a frosty winter afternoon), I’ll bring along my Kindle. It has a gorgeous leather case! Seriously, it looks much more substantial now, somehow part of the library- pipe-smoke-and-brandy-snifters-stuffed-armchair world it’s so rapidly displacing.

Well, enough about the Kindle. We'll always have Paris (or was it Amazon.com?). I'm out complaints regarding the Nook Color, so on to the praise.

First of all, it looks amazingly cool: dark and sleek and powerful, somehow. It’s also heavier than the Kindle, which seems like a disadvantage, but turns out to be just the opposite: a tennis ball weighs more than a Badminton shuttlecock, too; but the game feels more substantial because of that. You don’t play tennis in flip-flops. You turn on the Nook Colotand it feels like a miniature iPad. Or rather, an iPad sized properly for reading. People say it’s hard to read on the back-lit screen, that they get headaches from it, etc. I have no idea what they’re talking about. Lying in bed in a dark room next to a sleeping loved one, with your pug curled up beside you, wolfing down a book on that glowing screen is one of the most pleasurable reading experiences I’ve ever had. It mysteriously evokes the whole sense of entering another, more engaging, more brightly lit world that I remember from my childhood. Maybe it even evokes that famous ‘birth memory’ people are supposed to experience as they die: sliding toward the bright light of a new world. Okay, that may be going too far. But the backlit screen makes you want to go on reading forever. I downloaded The Lord of the Rings for that exact purpose. It seemed fitting anyway, as I caressed my Nook and kept it away from everyone else and muttered “My precious.”

Technically, once you get used to it, that hyper-sensitive touch screen becomes a real pleasure to use. Lightly tap the edge of the page and a new one appears – much more quickly than it does on the kindle, whose irksome ‘tiny-dot’ keyboard seems almost steam punk compared to the virtual one that materializes at the bottom of the Nook Color whenever you need it. In general, the Kindle feels utilitarian, almost like some kind of military issue piece of equipment, after using the Nook Color. In civilian terms, it’s like driving a Dodge Caravan after zipping around in a Lexus. And much the same way, let’s face it -- you don’t really need the Lexus to get to the grocery store. But it’s a life-enhancing luxury, and the Nook Color gives you the same rush for just an extra hundred dollars: seems like a good deal to me. It’s all amortized so quickly anyway – just not buying all those hard-cover books you’ll never read again (saving anywhere from ten to twenty dollars on each one) adds up fast, not to mention eliminating some of the diabolical book-clutter that always threatens to overwhelm any true book-nerd’s house.

You can also play chess, listen to Pandora radio and play video games on your Nook. You can read magazines in full color and just scroll down whole articles without the pesky ‘continued on P. 47’ interruptions. This is true for newspapers, also. If you like, the New York Times can be delivered to your Nook every morning, available when you actually wake up, unlike the physical paper, which never seems to arrive on my doorstep before I have to leave for work. And the color photography – at least in the newspapers – seems to have a much higher resolution on the e-book reader.

So, the Nook Color seems almost perfect to me – smaller and lighter than the iPad, with all of its best reading-related features, sleeker, quicker, more advanced than the Kindle, and still allowing you the same e-book ease of reading – and buying! – books.

Let’s not forget buying. Barnes and Noble offers almost three times as many books as Amazon, so your chances of finding the book you want in digital form are much better. The other day I was roaming around on line and found an embedded trailer for a movie called The Other Woman on Nikki Finke’s web site. I played the preview. The movie, starring Natalie Portman, looked interesting, but wasn’t coming out for a while. I freeze-framed the credits, saw it was based on a book by Ayelet Waldman, clicked onto Barnes and Noble, bought the book for my Nook and was reading it happily, all in less than a minute.

No wonder e-books are outselling the “hinge-and-stitch” dead tree pulp variety. They can’t compete with that.

Internet, RIP: Proprietors Win, Again

2011-01-16T07:04:00.000-08:00

The internet as we know it is officially doomed, as of today, and I’m already feeling nostalgic. Funny that a technology could move so fast across the landscape of my life – from a geeks-only fluke to a curiosity, to a useful tool, to a powerful engine of procrastination and finally a central venue for all my communications, research, entertainment and shopping, only to be reduced to the closed down, controlled, censored corporate cash cow it’s about to become, with the Obama administration’s blessing.

Internet, we barely knew ye.

But of course the Proprietors of our Nation couldn’t allow this internet business to go on the way it was heading. What a frightening thought – free, unobstructed communications, with no control and no profit … people just saying whatever they want, whenever they want, leaking documents, downloading YouTube videos that make Proprietor-controlled media outlets look like liars. You knew there’d be repercussions after the “Colbert bombed at the Press Association Dinner” narrative was reduced to one more punchline, a million downloads later.

The bigger headache for the Proprietors, from the start, was how to monetize this new tool and use it to consolidate power. After all, the ‘world-wide web’ seemed inimical to the consolidation of anything, an open-source free-for-all, wild and uncontrollable as the American Frontier itself. But they managed to organize that anarchic sprawl – nothing like guns and small pox, railroad lines and highways, corporate tax breaks and zoning variances, to tame a continent. It took a while, but our coast to coast shopping mall stands as the shining trophy of their triumph. We outlasted the last of the Mohegans; welcome to Mohegan Sun!

The free internet will collapse much more quickly. The Proprietors understood almost from the start that all you really need to control the internet is to control people’s access to it. (Remember stuffy old Al Gore’s warnings about ‘toll booths on the information superhighway’?) That’s the real value of the high speed cable or DSL connection. Dial-up was slow, and anyone could get on-line any time and go anywhere. But Comcast controls our access to the internet now, and that's fine with us we like it, we like the speed and convenience, the bread and the circus, football in HD on a giant flat screen TV or a bucket of chicken from KFC.

So Comcast, or some corporate entity identical to Comcast, will soon determine which web-sites you can visit easily and which ones take forever to load, which services you can use at all ... perhaps even what content you’re allowed to see. China is doing that right now and despite all our disapproving noises, our government is moving in exactly the same direction. Netflix is one of the earliest and most prominent victims. They’re in for the fight of their life right now, and it must be disheartening to know that they can take a law-suit all the way to the Supreme Court only to lose with chilling certainty to a court which has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Proprietor oligarchy. This is a group of judges who think corporations are people, though they’re not so sure about actual people, whom they rule against in one cruel and Dickensian decision after another. Am I a crackpot conspiracy theorist to speculate that this is the real reason they decided the 2000 election Bush’s favor? Whether by plan or happy accident, he managed to pack the court with a lifetime’s worth of frightening conservatives who can be guaranteed to rule along Proprietary lines.

Don’t get me wrong: this is nothing new. The ruling elites have struggled to hold onto their power, growing ever more corrupt until toppled be revolution or debauchery or both, allowing another group to rise and self-destruct in the same way, since the caveman with the biggest club figured out he could get the most Mastodon meat. People are predictably awful, power corrupts, history repeats itself.

But something new has arisen in our era, strutting rather than slouching toward its dystopian Second Coming. This Oligarchy has managed to combine the power of mass media with a diabolically subverted education system (Leave No Child Behind) and an unwavering ability to strike the proletarian nerve with ‘values issues’ like abortion and gay marriage. It’s relatively easy to convince an ignorant rabble that government is bad and taxes are worse, that health care is evil and the gilded age for the wealthiest stock manipulators and hedge fund Sun Kings (more despicable than any top-hatted grotesque in a Communist propaganda cartoon) should proceed without a hitch. That billionaires like the Koch brothers are behind this bogus ‘grass roots’ movement should surprise no one. Instead, step back with grudging respect and admire their audacity. How to get poor people who can’t afford a doctor’s visit to cut taxes for millionaires and deny themselves any kind of proper health care, education or secure employment? Use their own prejudices, leverage their fear, manipulate their anger. “Get the government’s dirty hands off my Medicare!” What a perfect delicious, sublime sentiment with which to inoculate a population through the IV drip of a thousand blaring radio and television propaganda shows, a million campaign ads.

The only way to break this Oligarchy would be to outlaw television advertisements in political campaigns. That would sever one of the crucial linkages that bind the system together. If candidates didn’t need the money they spend on television, they could break free from the powerful interests who control that funding. They couldn’t be bought; they wouldn’t be owned: their next election would not be in the hands of deep-pocketed, demanding contributors. But of course that will never happen. It would destroy local TV stations, who depend on that gold-rush of combative ads, and their ‘grass roots’ battle against the socialists trying to deny people (corporations are people now, remember) their right to be heard in ‘the public square’ would be funded by the same people who keep thr Tea Party afloat. Elections will proceed as usual, the only change being that even more money will be spent than ever before. Big money fails sometimes – occasional candidates are simply too extreme to be electable, no matter what. But most of the time, the system works well.

The internet was the first real threat to this unprecedented consolidation of power. But that threat is gone and the only thing that will bring this global hegemony down is some vast international implosion of greed: the end of cheap oil, the acceleration of global warming, the destruction of the oceans the contamination of the drinking water. The world the Proprietors have built as a palace for themselves will have to crumble to bits from its own mindless greed, as all the others have, throughout history. Unfortunately, this time, the rest of the world is going to come down, also. They’ll take us all with them when they go – they’re ‘too big to fail’.

But so were the dinosaurs.

And this afternoon, the thought of a whole planet staggering through the rubble, reduced to plowing with horses, heating with scavenged wood and lighting homes with tallow candles, a life of medieval toil at the mercy of the elements, with travel and indoor plumbing and refrigeration the subjects of a dim racial memory and hare-brained science fiction – it seems like a fine trade-off. If that’s what it takes to bring these foul greedy tyrants to their knees, bring it on. I would go to war against them, but the war has already been lost. Today’s FCC report proves it; we live in their world, and we will go on living in their world until they bring it down around us. Then we’ll be living in their ruins. I can only hope the next oligarchs, the shrewd operators who get control of the fresh water, or manage to piece together the first electrical generator, will have learned something from the blind gluttonous excess of their predecessors.

But I doubt they will. They never have before.

2011-01-16T06:56:00.001-08:00

Branding Fatigue: The Problem with Populatr Fiction

2011-01-16T06:55:00.001-08:00

Finishing the last page of Michael Connelly’s new novel, The Reversal, I couldn’t help thinking of a friend of mine, who met our local author at a party this summer. Elin Hilderbrand writes breezy romances set on our summer tourist island – stories of beach club staffers and waiters, unhappy vacationing wives, lusty locals, troubled families putting their lives back together among the mild Atlantic breezes and the clambakes. Her first books barely made a ripple, but she cracked the New York Times best-seller list with the last one, and it seemed like she had it made: a book-a-year professional scribbling about her home town, supporting herself with her words, vocation and avocation one, work as play for mortal stakes, just as Robert Frost described in his wonderful poem, “Two Tramps in Mud-Time”.

Turns out, not so much.

Actually, she’s kind of miserable. I know, I know – world’s smallest violin: you’re blond and rich and good looking and they make you write the same book over and over again – boo hoo. I’m painting houses sixty hours a week – let’s trade. But her predicament is real. She actually has to write the same book every year, with slight variations, of course. Still, it’s a whole book and you have to put it down on paper word by word, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. That can be a slog.Those books started to bore me five years ago, but I don’t have to write them. The problem is, they’re starting to bore Hilderbrand, too.

And it shows.

She’s not alone, that’s the worst part of it. I remember a thriller writer from my childhood named Alistair MacLean. He’s most famous now (if he’s famous at all) for a handful of his books they made into movies: Where Eagles Dare, Ice Station Zebra, The Guns of Navarone. The last one of these was the beginning of the end … or rather, the sequel was. Force 10 From Navarone (It was Robert Shaw’s last movie and one of Harrison Ford’s first) was bad, but not anywhere near as bad as the book, which was clearly a sequel not to the original novel, but to the popular Gregory Peck film. I was fifteen years old but I knew a sell-out when I saw one. And Maclean’s books after that had a dreary, I’m-only-writing-this-to-pay-my-alimony feeling about them. Finally I just gave up. I didn’t understand what was going on back then, but now I do. MacLean was suffering from the exactly the same malady as Elin Hilderbrand. The plague was in its infancy at that point, but it has reached full pandemic status now: writers sell by branding themselves and reliably turning out a familiar product. The paperback of the last book comes out just in advance of the next book’s hardcover release, usually with a little teaser chapter at the back to spike the reader's interest: momentum builds, sales acuumulate, and the writer has deadlines to meet.

It makes me think of comedians like the Flight of Conchords boys, who spent years developing the material that comprised their hilarious HBO program’s first season Then they had maybe six months to throw together the material for the next one. Fifteen years … six months. Of course the quality went down, Bret and Jermaine had sense enough to cancel the third outing and get back to work at a more reasonable pace. As far as I’m concerned they can take their time – Jonathan Franzen spent nine years writing the follow-up to The Corrections -- and it shows.

As I struggle happily with a new novel myself, I’m encouraged to know that I’m not fighting against a deadline; as I make radical changes in the story, it’s nice to know that I won’t have to defend them to an irate publisher. I can dawdle and write as I like: that’s a luxury few professional authors can claim.

The problem is that the relentless schedule, the unappeasable expectations, begin to wear these authors down, even the best and most consistent of them. The last couple of books by Michael Connelly are showing a kind of metal fatigue (Maybe it’s some consolation to him that even metal gets tired): they groan and creak with familiar tropes and predictable twists. They exhale a gloomy sense of exhaustion. The characters are just going through their paces, now, like road show actors in some long running hackneyed farce. I don’t blame Connelly: it’s the system. It still works for some people – most notably Lee Child, who is happy churning out his Jack Reacher books; others escape into a different set of expectations, like Ken Follett, who has become the new maestro of the ponderous historical epic.

The mechanical quality of so much popular fiction (One thinks of the ‘novel writing machines’ in the Ministry or Truth that churned out cliché romantic pap for the Proles in 1984) comes from turning our best genre writers into machines. My agent is sending out a dark sexual noir thriller right now, and he said to me recently, “I hope you have a few more of these up your sleeve. Anyone who publishes this will want to know you can do it again.” It’s a conundrum: I’d like to be published of course, but I feel for Elin Hilderbrand when I think of being locked into writing an endless series of transgressive sexual thrillers, of being the go-to creepy noir guy, of being branded.

Branding started with cattle, a ranch logo burned into the flesh of a steer to prove ownership. It’s not that different now. I hear the feed is good (lots of corn), but we all know who winds up getting eaten.

As for me, I’m happy to run wild, at least a little longer. The grazing is skimpy, but I’m used to it. And I’d be happy to see Elin Hilderbrand and Michael Connelly out here with me, escaped from the feed lot, working at their own pace, living life on their own time, at last. Their lives would be a lot better.

And so would their books.

TV Tonight: "Hawaii 5-O"

2011-01-16T06:53:00.001-08:00

Hawaii 5-0 (10:00, Mndays, CBS)is the most surprising new show on television. I dimly remember the original – a blunt and uninspiring police procedural with a palm tree background, shot mostly on sound stages, with its tough guy cop and ho-hum sidekick (“Book ‘em, Dano”).

The new show I a pleasant relief from the cable political shows I often find myself watching. The heroes and villains are no less crudely drawn, but in my tropical cop show the good guys win and the bad guys often get shot, which makes a pleasant break from watching Tea Party candidates advancing in the polls at home and toxic red sludge spills advancing on the Danube, abroad.

Hawaii 5-0 is filmed on location and really uses the culture and texture of the islands. Two of the characters are locals, and the hero, though white, was raised as a native by his police chief father. Scott Caan plays the fourth member of the team, a transplanted New Jersey cop, who has turned his life upside-down and traveled 5000 miles, just to spend weekends with his daughter. Caan is an engaging actor, with much of his father’s macho spirit, leavened by an easy-going sense of humor. You can imagine him as Sonny Corleone, but he would have made a far more appealing hot-head Mafiosi than his Dad. The story-lines involving Dano and his daughter are authentically – surprisingly – touching. The moment where he’s pleading for shared custody into a locked-gate intercom (only to find out he’s talking to his e-wife’s maid), breaks your heart and makes you laugh at the same time. Dano’s ultimate custody victory has nothing to do with his wife’s compassion or clemency, though: it turns out that McGarrett pulled strings with the Governor over some business contracts, to put pressure on the new husband. “You’re not as alone out here as you think you are,” he tells Dano, in a moment of unexpected fraternity.

Not that the show is all touchy-feelie. Daniel Dae Kim’s character was thrown off the force for (apparently ungrounded) corruption charges, and has to deal with becoming a small town pariah among his old friends and colleagues. His cousin, played by Grace Park, takes his side, sometimes against her own friends and colleagues. She rounds out the team, and the intimate knowledge of Hawaii they share with McGarrett contrasts in a very entertaining way with Dano’s off-island alienation. Together they make Hawaii itself a character in the drama.

Beyond all this, she show is fun. They play with the old catch phrases in amusing ways. The second time McGarrett says “Book ‘em Dano”, Dano rolls his eyes and says, “Are we doing this now?” He’s already tired of it; but his irritation makes us smile.

The procedural elements of the show are workmanlike – no one expects Sherlock Holmes or even Michael Bloomkvist here – but the action is sharp and well-choreographed. Alex O’Loughlin as McGarrett is physically credible as a kick-ass ex military man, as much assault commando as policeman. In a way this all is a throwback to the sixties, when hour long cop dramas like Hawaii 5-0 wanted nothing more than to provide escapist entertainment. So much of what I watch these days strives for so much more -- and often succeeds: Mad Men, Dexter, Boardwalk Empire … even The Good Wife, on Hawaii 5-0’s own network. It turns out I had kind of forgotten the simple minded pleasures of old school television. Still it’s not as easy to turn out a frictionless piece of hack work as it used to be. We settled for so much less, in the old days.. Just watching a show in color was a thrill. We didn’t care about the tacky sets and interior ‘exterior’ street scenes, the predictable plots or trite dialogue. To give us those same simple pleasures now requires so much more: sharp writing, committed acting, real locations, big budgets – so much work and investment to make a light-hearted throw-away cop show; and the touch of soul. that lifts it above the average entertainment just feels like good luck. Personally, I’m glad they took the trouble, and I hope they stay lucky.

Pomaika`i Hawaii 5-0.

And keep up the good work. There are a lot of us tired people out there who can’t watch another minute of Chris Matthews or Anderson Cooper, and we’re all counting on you to distract us.

Art and Fun: Steve Martin's "An Object of Beauty"

2011-01-16T06:50:00.000-08:00

I find it bizarrely ironic that Steve Martin’s recent interview at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan ended so badly. E-mailers from all across the country (the interview was shown to subscribers on closed-circuit TV) were invited to comment and they did, demanding less art talk and more details about the comedian’s career –what was it like hosting the Oscars? Where did you learn to play banjo? How did you get that arrow through your head? The general impression was that Steve Martin had written, and now wanted discuss at droning length, an expository ‘novel’ crammed to bursting with high falutin’ cultural references and dreary factoids – a snob’s piñata full of carrots and pocket dictionaries, not even worth hitting.

The irony comes when you read the book

It’s delightful, and I say that as a dedicated reader who was not thrilled with Steve’s previous efforts -- the wan May December rich-man poor girl romance Shopgirl and the follow up, about a phobia-plagued recluse, The Pleasure of my Company. Most struggling writers I know were irked by these efforts, which would probably never have seen the light of day without a celebrity’s name attached. It’s one thing for a famous performer (Or reality show star) to pen a ghost-written autobiography. Poaching our territory and attempting novel seems presumptuous: an act of pure privilege, some kind of perverse literary droit de seigneur. Steve was dabbling, and it showed.

Well, it’s been seven years since that last book, and Steve used the time well. He’s obviously been working at his craft (did he sneak into an MFA program?) because this book is good. More than that, it’s fun. The story of Lacey Yeager, a rising star in the New York art world, it combines the diverse pleasures of a Christopher Isherwood or Truman Capote-like free spirit viewed from an adoring distance by a male narrator with the gossipy plot of a Judith Krantz novel and the zeitgeist marksmanship of Tom Wolfe. Of course, the writing isn’t as poetic as Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Berlin Stories. You don’t get the delirious page-turning junk food sugar high of trash classics like Scruples and Princess Daisy. And it lacks the red-line energy and epic polymath cultural obsession of A Man in Full or I am Charlotte Simmons. But Judith Krantz hasn’t written a novel in more than ten years, and Capote and Isherwood are dead. While we wait for Tom Wolfe’s big Miami book, this slim volume of Steve Martin’s makes an enjoyable substitute.

We watch Lacey’s rise from Sotheby’s drone to gallery owner, and Steve lets us guess at the dirty scandalous secret behind her success, revealing it at the perfect moment with the understated flourish and impeccable timing familiar from his best comedy routines and screenplays. Balzac said it: “Behind every great fortune is a great crime”, and the spectre of various art world crimes and frauds haunt Lacey’story, from the con-artists of the downtown galleries to the robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, to the subtle tricks of rigging an art auction. The book takes place over twenty years and encompasses many changes in the art world, as well as the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war. Through all her ups and downs, her brief affairs (She only sleeps with men on the first date), her cunning tactics and shady dealings, Lacey remains a novelist’s triumph: like Holly Golightly and Sally Bowles, like Charlotte Simmons and Billy Winthrop, she’s a character you can’t help loving , even against your better judgment, who you root for even when she’s wrong, and who you want to keep reading about forever.

That should take some of the sting out of a bad night at the Y.

Remembering Irvin Kershner

2010-11-29T13:19:00.000-08:00

Film director Irvin Kershner died today, at his home in Paris. He was 87 years old. I hadn’t seen him since an extraordinary pair of meetings twenty-eight years ago, but he remains one of the most vivid figures I ever encountered in Hollywood.

I didn’t know much about him when the producer of my little family drama movie script set up the meeting, but I could tell he considered it a major coup. I did some research and found out that Kersher had directed some great television shows during what I would refer to as the first ‘Golden Age’of TV (we’re in the middle of the second one, now): episodes of Naked City, Kraft SuspenseTheatre and Ben Casey, before going on to make such extraordinary films as The Luck of Ginger Coffey, A Fine Madness and The Flim-Flam Man. Of course he is best known today for directing what most aficionados agree was the best of the Star Wars movies – The Empire Strikes Back. Indeed he was just coming off that career high success, looking for a new project, when I got the chance to meet him.

It was quite an intimidating set up – the luxurious office on the Warners lot, the giant photograph of Yoda that dominated the wall behind his desk, and the man himself – craggy, bearded, sharp eyed, a true Jedi Knight in his own brand of creative warfare. The rumor about him was that he was difficult, contrary, obstructionist – he could “turn a go project into a development deal” with one meeting. He was tough with me, but I found his criticisms stringent and illuminating, like a semester of film school in a single afternoon.

The main problem he had with my script was the long passage in the middle during which the father character and his oldest friend reminisce and re-litigate their lifetime of conflict over a series of excellent meals and walks on the winter beaches of Nantucket.

“This isn’t a movie!” he barked, dropping the script on his desk liker something dead that had just twitched alarmingly.

“Right,” my hapless producer agreed. “It’s – it’s a play. All that dialogue …”

Kershner turned that beady stare on him. “It’s not even a play! It’s nothing!

There’s no drama, here. It’s just two geezers chewing the fat. A movie is about what happens next. Don’t you get that? Look, I say to you – this script is shit. You can’t write. Get out of the business while you still can. What do you do? That’s insulting! That’s abusive! What are you going to do about it?”

“I,uh –“

“Are you going to break into tears? Run out of the room? Stand up and slug me? I don’t know – but you’re going to do something. That’s a movie! Here’s how EVERY SCENE in a movie should play. Pay attention to me, kid. There’s a nail sticking up out of this desk. I wrap a red rubber band around it and start pulling. The rubber band starts stretching, it pulling thin, turning pink, it’s about to snap, you’re flinching in advance … and then – pow! The nail comes out of the table. That’s what I’m looking for -- that kind of reversal, that kind of surprise.”

He didn’t like my ending, either.

“The father admits the son is talented, and they kiss and make up. It’s shit. It’s a TV movie. Do you watch TV?”

“Sure,” I said “I mean – sometimes, I guess, but –

“Well as long as you’re working with me, you don’t watch TV. Not one second of it. It’s all shit. It’s written like shit, it’s acted like shit, it’s directed like shit and if you keep watching that shit you won’t be able to do anything else.”

A silence fell. My producer, he seemed near tears – he had no idea how jazzed I was – said, “So… we’re done here?”

But Kershner wasn’t done. He didn’t think much of the father son relationship that made up the core of the story.

“It’s all in the past,” he said. “it’s all memory and back story and no one cares.”

“So … what do you think I should do instead?” I asked.

“Give them some real conflict, something that’s happening right now. The kid has a girlfriend – let the dad be fucking her. That should heat things up a little. Write me that draft – and cut thirty pages out of it.”

We reeled out of there, into the dry heat of a Los Angeles September afternoon, and my Producer apologized profusely for his old friend’s rudeness – over a sumptuous lunch at a nearby Taco Bell. He always was a big spender. I told him not to worry about it. I was already framing the re-write in my head and when I met Kershner, two weeks later, I had a new draft that ran 90 stream-lined pages.

He hefted it with a grin “Fighting weight,” he said.

I was dazzled and star struck – I had just seen Sean Connery coming out of his office, wearing a track suit … the meeting before mine. I figured out later what that meeting signified: Kershner was about to direct his own version of a James Bond movie with Connery, a re-make of Thunderball.

His decision had already been made, and I wasn’t even in the running.

I probably didn’t deserve to be.

So I didn’t get a movie made that year, and I didn’t get a screen credit an entrée to the Writer’s Guild or a big slab of screenplay money. But I got a lesson in writing I’ll never forget, and every time I ratchet up the conflict in a scene or somehow manage to pull that nail out of the table, I think of Irvin Kershner and bow my head in gratitude to thewild-eyed genius who played Yoda to my humble Padawan.

It was definitely Kerhner's voice I heard in his movie when old Jedi said "Do, or do not. There is no try."

I was lucky to have met him, and I’m sad to see him go.

In Defense of the MFA

2010-11-16T15:48:00.000-08:00

Poets and Writers magazine features their second annual ranking of the top MFA programs in the country, and “new for 2011’ a list of the ten best low residency programs. My school, Vermont College of the Fine Arts, is ranked number one among them, beating such distinguished competition as Goddard, Bennington and Warren Wilson College.

The issue hits the newsstands in the midst of an impressive anti-MFA backlash. This form of graduate education produces a blandly competent but uninspired, academically homogenized prose that just kind of sucks the life out of you – that’s the consensus of articles I’ve been skimming lately. From Anis Shivani writing on the Huffington Post about overrated writers, to one of his prime targets, Juno Diaz, everyone is piling on the poor old Master of Fine Arts degree. Publishable prose simply can’t be drilled or cajoled out of the untalented, that’s the gist of it.

John Fowles compared the teaching of writing to equipping a fisherman – you can have all the best gear, a state of the art rod and fresh bait, but none of that helps if you’re standing in the middle of a cornfield. “What matters is having a river to fish in,” Fowles pointed out.

Well, true enough. But knowing a bit about fishing can’t hurt; and especially if you have a good trout stream in front of you. Sloshing around in the shallows grabbing at them bare-handed just doesn’t work very well.

Trust me, I’ve tried it.

Still, the idea of going to school, particularly graduate school, just to get an education seems increasingly quaint and eccentric. My own original plan was relatively pragmatic: get the degree, publish a book (the most minor publication would suffice), and then take those letters after my name and the ISBN number after the title of my book and get myself a college teaching job. The first part was relatively easy. I got the degree, but I remain unpublished as of this writing. Nor is this a unique predicament. As the nay-sayers will tell happily tell you, few MFA graduates ever achieve substantial literary success. In a world where you read about six-year-old kids getting book deals, this can be mildly disheartening. One of my own professors, Douglas Glover, put it best, in the first lecture I ever heard him deliver:

Now more than ever, it is possible to get a doctorate in creative writing, and it is possible to get degrees in non-fiction writing, editing, playwriting and screenwriting. And, sad to say, it is possible to obtain one of these degrees without writing a publishable sentence, paragraph, story, novel or essay.

Going to writing school has become a bit like take piano and water color lessons in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a popular outward sign of bourgeois cultural accomplishment, a commercially available testimonial of creativity, the public stamp of approval. You know how, in The Wizard of Oz, at the end, the scarecrow gets a diploma. Well, here’s your diploma, you are a licensed creator, the equal of Joyce and Homer. But it doesn’t mean you can write a book that is publishable, let alone a work of art or, dare we say it, a masterpiece, a classic, that you read with intensity and wisdom, that you love your tools as if they were your children.

Ironically, it was this lecture that convinced me to attend Vermont College in the first place. Regardless of the statistics and the glum professional forecasts for Master of Fine Arts graduates, I wanted to work with Glover. I was sure I could learn some valuable things from him. Indeed, I already had, just at that first lecture. The bulk of it concerned the use of verbs, and the dangers one verb in particular, the ever-present “To be”, that ghastly centerpiece of the passive voice. Why did Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales say “Mistakes were made”? Because if he given up the passive voice and introduced a real verb into his sentence, he would have had to acknowledge who exactly made those mistakes. “I made mistakes,” for instance: a much stronger sentence, but not nearly as cunning and vague. Doug called this lecture “Attack of the Copula Spiders” – referring to his habit of putting a dot in the middle of a page and drawing lines to all the ‘to be’ formulations, covering student papers with giant spider diagrams.

Doug is obsessed with verbs. He counts them in sentences and paragraphs, balances them against the articles and nouns, cherishes them, collects them, celebrates them. As F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out (in a letter to his daughter that Doug quoted in the course of the lecture) verbs carry sentences. An inert sentence like “The rabbit was on the lawn” can become something beautiful in the hands of a great writer. Fitzgerald says:

Probably the finest technical poem in English is Keats’ “Eve of St. Agnes”. A line like “The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass” is so alive you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement – the limping, trembling and freezing are going on before your own eyes.

When I say Glover counts the verbs, I mean that literally. He has made a science of it. In the lecture he discusses this text from Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart:

“That morning’s ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together, or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam. The islands stood in frozen woody brown dusk: it was now between three and four in the afternoon. A sort of breath from the clay, from the city outside the park, condensing, made the air unclear; through this the trees around the lake soared frigidly up. Bronze cold of January bound the sky and the landscape; the sky was shut to the sun – but the swans, the rims of ice, the pallid withdrawn Regency terraces had an unnatural burnish, as though cold were light. There is something momentous about the height of winter. Steps rang on the bridges, and along the black walks. This weather had set in; it would freeze harder tonight.

This is a landscape opening that also tells the reader where and when the novel starts and what the weather was like which, in turn, establishes a certain atmosphere… astir with life and movement. How is it done? Well, there asre eight sentences, one hundred and forty seven words and twenty-three verbs, verbal adjectives or verbal nouns (Note the one deft use of the passive voice.) You can express this again as a ratio: in this passage, Bowen writes a 23/8 verb to sentence ratio, three verbs per sentence … simple ratios don’t tell the whole rhetorical story, but they begin to tell you about verbs. Beyond the ratio you should immediately notice the quality of the verbs: three copulas (“was,” “is,” “were”), one passive voice (“was shut”), three generics (“left,” “had,””made”) and one slightly abstract verb (“set in”) against fifteen precise, concrete action.

This was a revelation to me. I started counting verbs myself doing it everywhere, even at breakfast. One day, I was reading the cereal box and the milk carton in front of me as I wolfed my morning meal: Alpen and Stoneyfield Farms. It occurred to me that the milk was much more engrossing, so I turned to statistics. Alpen: “Organic rolled oats and crispy whole wheat flakes containing all the bran and wheat germ are combined with toasted hazelnuts and roasted almonds for a rich, hearty taste.” 28 words, one copula (in the passive voice), two verbal adjectives … two verbs.

Stoneyfield: “We started Stoneyfield Farm milking cows and making quarts of yogurt at our little hilltop organic farming school in 1983” 21 words. Three verbs and a gerund.

28/2 vs. 21/3: Case closed.

I know this sounds suffocatingly technical and abstract. In fact, it’s vital – even visceral. But at first this raised consciousness simply paralyzed me, as learning to drive with a stick shift had done, so many years ago – lots of stalling and flooding. Still, I eventually internalized Glover’s analytical perspective, and started to enjoy driving my own prose, down-shifting through its twists and turns, finally starting to take control.

So I applied to the school, got in and followed my girlfriend into the most rewarding and exciting two years of my whole catch-as-catch can educational life. I worked with Chris Noel, author of the beautiful and moving grief memoir In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing; with crime fiction maestro Domenic Stansberry and with short story writer and political activist Diane Lefer. I went to dozens of lectures during the ten day residencies, worked and got worked over in the workshops, found brilliant poets like Brendan Constantine, extraordinary memoirists like Andrew Hood, word-slinging jazz-riffing novelists like Barry Wightman.

The residencies reminded me of those British holiday camps, sometimes: you never had a moment yourself. The days were packed: the longer you’d been there the more people whose final lectures and readings you had to attend. Not to mention the faculty readings, visiting writer readings, student readings and of course the renegade reading, late at night in Noble Hall, where you could try out anything if you didn’t mind being pelted by ping-pong balls. The sense of community thrilled me. You could sit at any table in the Dewey dining hall and start a conversation with anyone – you all had the same things on your minds, had just been to the same lectures, just worked with the same professors.

Finally, in my last semester, I took the leap and signed up to work with Doug Glover. Here’s what I wrote in my final evaluation:

Doug’s approach can best be described as surgical rigor. His first move was to throw out my original lecture plans, assign me a pile of books and explain the new lecture: read these books, figure how the authors did what you’re trying to do, and write about it. As I worked through draft after draft I was always impressed and inspired by the painstaking relentless devotion to clarity and intelligent analysis his comments revealed.

The same is true for the difficult fiction project I was attempting – a group of related stories actually ‘written’ by the various characters in the novel. As Doug pointed out, first things first: learn how to write one publishable short story, learn the basics of story construction, start from scratch. Doing seven stories in seven different styles and voices will have to wait. So that’s what we worked on: conflict, inciting incidents, image patterning, plot structure. Am I an expert craftsman of the short story now? No, but at least I know what I need to work on, and I have a direction to follow in the years ahead. I think I’ll have Doug’s sharp-witted jovial acidic voice in my mind for the rest of my writing life. If it ever starts to fade, I have the lectures on tape!

In other topics, Doug was always supernaturally prompt with his detailed critiques and we spoke often on the phone, as well as e-mailing at various times. He couldn’t have been more accessible or cooperative.

The faint of heart had warned me about Doug, but the nickname ‘shredder’ reflects a basic misunderstanding of Doug’s methods. That would be like calling me “Chaos man” when I help my kids clean their rooms. We invariably start out by making the mess worse, emptying the jumbled drawers and pulling all the clothes, games, old ipods and Dreyer horses out of the closet, retrieving the food, books, mismatched shoes and long-lost band instruments from under the beds. That’s the chaos part, and it’s essential if you ever want to get organized. Doug works the same way – hey, the Marines work the same way. You have to break down the old bad habits and clarify the problems if you ever want to fix things.

Is this fun? No. Is it an ego-boost? Hardly.

But the truth is I entered for the program for the chance to work with Glover, and I’m glad I took it. I said to someone, doing anything else would be like going to the Labyrinth and not bothering to meet the Minotaur. So: a great semester; a great teacher. I emerge battered and humbled but more enthusiastic than ever about the work at hand; and more prepared than ever before to actually succeed at it.

Since I graduated, the first question everyone asks me is how the degree has affected my finances. Did I get a teaching job? Did I sell a book? Do I have anything – anything at all – concrete to show for the time and money I spent? Well, I did write a much better book than I could have written before, and I did find an agent for it. That’s a start. But my real answer to the question of what I got out of Vermont College remains the stubbornly quaint and eccentric one: I got an education.

I highly recommend it.

9/11 Letters: Rage, Hope and the American Jihad

2010-11-16T15:44:00.000-08:00

My memory of 9/11 has been shaped by all the events that happened since – wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Patriot Act and the growing surveillance state that legislation initiated; my greater understanding of the Middle East and Islam; a broader historical awareness of America’s role in that part of the world, going back almost sixty years. But I wrote a letter to my local paper that day, and the paper came out two days later. This was raw, uneducated, unfiltered reaction; I suppose it had to be reactionary. I was vilified by my friends and embraced by people I despised. It was a strange moment. My son, who returned this Spring from studying Arabic in Amman, Jordan, just shakes his head at the overheated rhetoric of this crazy broadside.

But I don’t think I was alone, even among liberals. There was a reason George W. Bush had a 90% approval rating in the angry, war-mongering days after the attack; a reason why he could leverage his own catastrophic blunder into an opportunity to attempt the neo-conservative strategy of imposing our way of life on people who hated it. It’s worth taking a look at this troubling snap-shot of outraged patriotism, if we want to understand how the 9/11 attacks led us to where we stand today, fighting two wars and on the brink of a third. Will Yemen be next? And is there any way to pull back? Maybe, by repudiating the knee-jerk vengeful rage of the first letter that follows.

9/11/2001

I don't know what this makes anyone else feel, but I'll tell you what I'm feeling tonight: sheer red-eyed rage and fury. The amputation of the World Trade Center, the violation of my home town, the sheer senseless, blood and cant-soaked religion fuelled hatred of the act make me feel about the whole world of Islam what they have been feeling about us for decades. They want a religious war? I say give it to them. I say let them find out what happens when they awaken this sleeping giant. I say carpet bomb the whole Middle East -- every one of those countries, with all the innocent people in them. This has to be a calamity for them, an act of God, a typhoon, a tidal wave, a rain of toads. They have to learn that they cannot let their lunatic fringe declare war on the most powerful country in the world because if they do we will reach over and crush them like the puny desert bugs they are.

What no American politician has ever understood is that you cannot fight these people in a civilized way. Jimmy Carter never grasped this. He tried to negotiate with a culturally institutionalized mass psychosis. He talked about the energy crisis as the 'moral equivalent of war' and then failed to notice when the real thing actually happened. Iran declared war on us, and we refused to fight it. That sent the terrorists a message they've never forgotten. George Bush Senior only made things worse when he refused to deal decisively with Saddam Hussein. And the same thing is happening again.

George W. is talking about 'hunting down' and 'punishing' the perpetrators. This is just bombastic noise: The ones who committed the act are dead. The ones who gave the orders are impossible to hunt down. It's like finding the one mosquito with the West Nile virus. You don't capture a million mosquitos and give them each a blood test -- you wipe out ALL MOSQUITOS .. or at least you do the best you can. You spray. That's what we have to do.

The sad fact is there's no middle ground between the pathetic nothing of the President’s rhetorical outrage and the ruthless everything of total war. To fight terrorism effectively, innocent people will have to be killed. Beautiful historical sites will have to be destroyed. A whole sick culture will have to go down in flames. It's our God against their God, and Jesus can warm the bench on this play, folks. Because we need the Old Testament God now. We need someone in the White House with the guts to enact the towering rage that is exploding in the American people tonight. If Bush and his geriatric cold warriors can't do it, I volunteer.

It wouldn't cause world war III -- Putin is ready to fight and that's one thing the Russians are good at. If there is a World War III, it will be the whole civilized world united to wipe out this insane cancerous society which has been metastasizing for a thousand years. And we can take out the Taliban while we're at it, and take over the Saudi Oil fields, too. Those towel-heads have been robbing us blind for decades.

The thing that really broke my heart was watching those towers collapse. I know that the actual crash was the true tragedy; the explosion killed the people. But the utter destruction of the buildings just levelled me. It was like ... the terrorist killed your lover, but before that he yanked out her two front teeth. The death is horrible, but the brutalization and disfigurement is worse somehow. That's the thing that gives you the rage to kill in your turn. And I'm in a killing mood tonight. I just wish our President felt the same way.

A wrote a sort of retraction the next week. Its open-hearted optimism strikes me today as even more naïve and tragic than my jingoistic tantrum:

Several people have told me they thought last weeks’ letter in the Inquirer and Mirror was “insane.” They couldn’t believe I was advocating unilateral military attacks against civilian targets in the Middle East. Perhaps I was insane when I wrote those things. But to take a reasonable position on the most appalling attack on our country since the war of 1812 at that moment, before the dust from the ruined towers had even settled on lower Manhattan … that would have been a different kind of insanity. Obviously, I have nothing to do with making military policy in this country. That gives me the luxury to vent my feelings. We all expected Colin Powell and the President to be more measured and – gratefully – they were . But in raving at this murderous outrage I was also trying to articulate feelings that many people shared. My hope was that seeing those raw emotions clearly stated in print might allow others a moment of relief – and a sense of perspective. An aggressive “Right on!” followed by a flinch reaction of “Oh no.”, hate and horror separate but profoundly connected – the lightning flash of bloodlust; and then the slow thunder of rational thought.

I could have written a letter with the opposite viewpoint the next day, and twenty others in the days since. Like everyone else I know, I have felt every possible emotion from helplessness and fear and guilt to the indignation and anger I described last week. The situation is too large and evil and unprecedented for any single reaction, and no one would want the snap-shot of one instant’s emotion to stand as a permanent record of their grief. Even the media, with their relentless ability to hype and exploit and over-dramatize any event, have been outstripped by the reality here.

The tactics I suggested were impractical as well as draconian. We need to find the actual culprits; killing thousands of innocent people in senseless bombing raids would please the terrorists more than anything else we could do. They would love to see us reduced to their level of bloody-toothed grinning barbarism; and even more than that, they would love to see us diminished in the eyes of the world. Because the fact is that we hold the moral high ground against them, for the first time in decades. Even Yassir Arafat is on our side. We have the chance to literally unite the entire globe in a confederation unparalleled in history and unimaginable before the eleventh of September. There might even be greater benefits to be gotten from this alliance than the eradication of terrorism.

Looking up from the smoking rubble of an insane act of war, we can see – if we’re willing to squint through the smoke – the astonishing possibility of a world at peace.

Of course, the future I glimpsed there was quickly and brutally foreclosed by the Bush administration, and continues to dwindle under Obama. I now have little hope and only occasional flickers of anger. A numb despair prevails: buckle into the harness and trudge forward. The situation is bad today, but it wasn’t great when we installed Saddam Hussein in Iraq – or the Shah in Iran. Systems unravel, empires decline. Things get worse; it’s a kind of geopolitical entropy that feels inevitable, now. I feel nostalgia today for the outrage and the optimism that animated those letters. I have very little of either one left … which may be the real legacy of 9/11.

And that’s the saddest thing of all.

Novel (or Memoir)-in-a-Box Contest

2010-11-16T15:41:00.000-08:00

My great professor at Vermont College, Douglas Glover, has a website now, called Numero Cinq, and he has been running interesting contests for the last six months -- an aphorism contest, a villanelle contest, and most eccentrically, a translation contest in which absloute ignorance of the language (Dutch, I think) was a prerequisite. You had to make up your own story based on the sound of the words, coaxing out any repititions, finding parallel sentence structures, writing your own lyrics, as it were, to the music of a foreign tongue. Wild. The new contest is below, and Doug says anyone can enter and in my opinion, not enough people have.

My entry (memoir) is at the bottom of this post.

Doug says:

Augusto Monterroso is perhaps most famous for his short story “The Dinosaur,” which is said to be literature’s shortest story. It reads in full:

When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.

In an 1996 interview with Ilan Stavans for the Massachusetts Review, Monterroso recalled some early reviews of “The Dinosaur”: “I still have the very first reviews of the book: critics hated it. Since that point on I began hearing complaints to the effect that it isn’t a short-story. My answer is: true, it isn’t a short story, it’s actually a novel.”

Brevity was, to say the least, an important concept for Monterroso. His essay “Fecundity” is included in The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays. It reads in full:

Today I feel well, like a Balzac; I am finishing this line.

—from Tom McCartan’s Crib notes on “What Bolaño Read”

The Contest

Okay, the long-awaited next Numéro Cinq literary contest, The First Annual Numéro Cinq Novel-in-a-Box/Memoir-in-a-Box Contest. The rules are pretty simple this time. You have to write an entire (don’t cut corners) novel or a memoir (personal narrative) consisting of 9 (a mystic number) chapters and each chapter can be no more than 5 lines long. (By lines, I mean the number of lines that appear on the comment box on the blog.) Fewer lines if you can. Try to remember what a novel is like: at least a couple of characters or more (usually), a conflict, development through a series of dramatic actions, etc. Alternatively, try to remember what a memoir looks like: a first person narrator (and a couple of other people or more), a thematically continuous narrative line often based on a conflict and or theme, development through a series of dramatic moments or incidents, etc. Indicate on your entry whether it is fiction or non-fiction (there will be separate prizes). (Note that in the Monterroso story quoted above there ARE two characters, the guy and the dinosaur.)

The contest is open to any living, sentient being in the universe. It is not limited to people who are already on the blog or VCFA students or former students. Everyone is welcome, and also welcome to join in other conversations or suggest topics.

Entries will be accepted between September 1 and September 15, 2010, and should be written in English (Gary) and attached as comments to this post (the usual practice at NC).

Remember the values we hold dear here at Numéro Cinq: WIT & ARROGANCE. Remember Gordon Lish’s phrase ATTACK SENTENCES!

P.S. Anyone who mentions the insidious phrase “flash fiction” will have his or her comment deleted from the blog. I mean this! Delete it from your minds. This is not a flash fiction contest.

dg

My Memoir in a Box:

(The actual Memoir ran here last year ... this is the Greatest Hits, ADD version ...)

One:

It was finally over Didn’t I know it already? Wasn’t it obvious?She was right, too – I had no business being surprised. We had been in the middle of the unspoken knowledge for years. It was like living in Chernobyl as desperate Russians were starting to do again now: ignoring the obvious and waiting for the symptoms to show.

Two:

How did I figure out that Ned was sleeping with my ex-wife? I wanted to sell my wedding ring. Nick freaked. Kim said, “I’ll keep it until he’s older.” So I gave it to her, in front of her friends. She called, furious: it was a spiteful thing to do. Ned agreed. Ned? He had to be fucking her. Only one way to be sure: read her diary.

Three:

Why stalk my ex-wife? I wanted to be fully included in my exclusion, in complete control of my helplessness. I found Lisa’s diary in her underwear drawer. Reading it was like a Krav Maga demonstration: pulled by the back of neck into a series of blows, the brutal parody of an intimate embrace. The only solution: walk away.

Four:

The agent said: “When are you moving to L.A?” But I had kids. I couldn’t leave them and I couldn’t take them. But I could resent them and I did.. Then Caity got sick and cleaning her puke off the bathroom walls at two AM I realized: this was what I wanted to be doing. This was where I wanted to be.

Five:

The advantages of divorce: time off, silence. The dishes in the sink are no longer a passive-aggressive statement. They’re just dishes. And no more nonogomy. A much needed new word: being sexually faithful to a woman who’s not fucking you. Happily married, I was the one guy at a party not smoking weed. Now I’m one of the guys. Pass the doobie.

Six:

Maybe divorced men should be quarantined for eight months. The first relationship is always bad – the first pancake you test the griddle with, and invariably throw out. Sasha was a good Catholic girl, so the more obvious erotic encouragements were out of the question. She didn’t want to put anything strange or unusual in her mouth.“I don’t even eat sushi,” she said.

Seven:

I was happily alone when I met Annie. Solo flights – that was my kind of flying. Solo cups – that was my kind of cup! Han Solo, that was my kind of corny outer space smuggler with a heart of gold! O Solo Mio – that was my kind of Mio. Then we read each other’s work and she kissed me under the Chekhov moon.

Eight

So we moved in together. She endured Caity’s pack of friends she battled Nick over his dirty dishes and won. She went to Grad school and I followed her like a horse clopping after another horse. I was no longer living in the past. It was a physical relief, like taking off a bulky coat I should never have been wearing in the first place.

Nine:

My Mom and my brother Peter came to Nantucket for Nick’s graduation. He walked into the house with a bag of groceries. Mom offered to help. He gave her a baffled look, said “I’m fine Mom,” and started unpacking the food. I said, “I guess that’s a look I’m going to have to start getting used to.”
“Yes,” she said. “But you never will.”

Beach Rules

2010-11-16T15:39:00.001-08:00

Looking back on it, the crucial moment occurred when she noticed she was still wearing underwear.

Normally that would have been a good thing -- modest and prudent. She wasn’t the type to ‘go commando’, especially in a sun dress. But the beach trips with her sister and brother in law had developed their own rituals, and changing into her bathing suit at the beach was one of them. After the first time, when she had been caught unprepared for the decision to actually go swimming (the surf was high and it was almost sundown), she had been more careful. On that occasion, she had been wearing bulky shorts and a flimsy t-shirt. She decided to wear the shorts into the water, but she didn’t want to go home in wet panties, so she slipped them off, sitting on the cool sand, and then struggled back into her shorts. The question was: had David glanced over at her during that unguarded moment? She had stood on her knees to wiggle into the shorts, naked from the waist down for a few seconds. He could have seen everything – or did the sightlines limit him to a view of her bare ass? She would normally have said bottom, or tush or even backside … but something in the way David had been looking at her lately, even fully dressed, made the raw single syllable more appropriate.

Bigger question: did she want him to have seen her? She certainly didn’t care any more if Sam looked at her, and she was supposed to be in love with Sam.

More troubling still: the night after that beach day she climbed on top of Sam and really made love to him for the first time in … well, a long time. Too long. So Sam was happy. And so was David: he had certainly been staring at her after that swim, when she bobbed out of the water with her soaked t-shirt clinging to her breasts, as close to naked as he’d ever seen her, stiff nipples showing pink through the pale membrane of cotton.

Funny, she had caught Sam glancing at her in that shirt a few weeks before – it was a little immodest even when it was dry -- and said something like “I’m never wearing this shirt in public again.” Well, so much for that resolve. She hadn’t just worn it, she had sat on the beach a foot away from her extraordinary brother in law, damp and brazen, and let him stare. Carol acted as though it meant nothing. Maybe it did mean nothing. Beach rules were different. You were supposed to show a little skin there. Anyway, David and Carol’s marriage was strong, supernaturally strong, or so it had always seemed. A moment of permissible summertime indecent exposure couldn’t change that.

She had worn the wet shorts home, and the next time she wore bikini bottoms under them. Still, she had to change into the top on the beach. She would have called it another oversight, then; now she knew better. She had stood a little apart, facing away, while David turned and Carol made a note in the margins of her book, and bared her back to him. But she had left her top on the sand and she had to lean down sideways to pick up the scrap of fabric. David’s could see everything. She could feel his eyes on her, memorizing the slight droop of her small firm breasts.

Their eyes met and he didn’t look away.

That was the sexiest thing of all: that he didn’t look away.

It felt strange and spooky and ambivalent. She didn’t want to cheat on Sam; she certainly didn’t want to seduce her sister’s husband.

But here she was, on the way to yet another beach afternoon, with her bathing suit in her big straw purse, along with the sun screen and bug spray and other practical supplies, wearing her sexiest panties, knowing she would have to slip out of them at some point, or go swimming with them on.She could have pulled over and changed; or just put her suit on in the bathroom at the cottage. But she didn’t want to. Her psychiatrist had said, “Find the thing that excites you, and then do It,” when she complained about her dormant libido.

Well, she had found the thing that excited her.

And she was doing it.

Carol was in Connecticut; Sam was working. This was going to be the first two- person beach picnic ever. Just like a date, except of course it wasn’t because David was like a brother to her. It didn’t have to be a problem. She’d just ask David to turn around while she changed. The beach at Squam was always deserted this time of year. She could have her dip in the water, modesty intact.

Except, she wasn’t going to ask; and she wasn’t sure he’d do it, anyway. He wanted to see her strip. Might as well just say it: he was hot for her and that made her hot. And feeling hot made her feel alive, connected to a world of possibilities, even if they were dangerous possibiulities, forbidden ones, destructive ones

Maybe especially if they were.

As to David, God knows why he was interested -- maybe his sex life was as arid as her own. Maybe he was just cool and adventurous. Maybe he had an open relationship with her sister. She had shared boyfriends with Carol before, when they were in high school and college, though they had usually shown the decorum to wait for a break-up.

Usually.

This is how it happened:

She stood on a chair to reach the picnic basket won from a high shelf, and let him look up her dress; handed it to him and let him look down the front. She let him put his arm around her waist on the way to the car and walked closer to him when his fingers slid down to cup her ass. All she felt at that moment was a raging frustration at the two layers of fabric between skin and skin.

That was the first time he had ever touched her, beyond the occasional brotherly hug or peck on the cheek. Some boundary had been broached. After that, it was easy for him to rest a hand on her knee as they drove, and to slide it upward, gathering the fabric as he bared her thighs.

And then, on the beach, after a glass of wine, she said “I guess I’ll just change then,” and stood in front of him and started unbuttoning the dress. When the two sides were hanging loose, shifting in the breeze from the water, she saw his sharpening attention, and thought about turning around. Instead and eased the fabric off her shoulders and let it fall, glancing up and down the empty beach. They were alone. The sun was warm on her exposed body. She was so white in the private places. It made her pause.

“Go on,” David said. His voice was rough.

She pushed down her panties to mid-thigh and then to her knees, finally letting them gather at her ankles and stepping out of them. When she reached for her bag he grabbed it.

“Let’s just skinny dip,” he said.

She ran for the water as he pulled his clothes off, and plunged into the icy grip of it. He was right behind her, his arms around her again, this time pulling her to him and pressing against the length of her, no fabric between them, skin slippery with the cold water. He was huge and she could feel him growing. He found her mouth and they plunged into a deep briny kiss. They went under for a few seconds and broke the surface laughing. He spread her legs in the dense, charged undertow and slipped into her and thrust once and she was coming instantly, crying out, biting his neck.

Then he carried her out of the water and laid her out on the beach towel. He paused over her for a few seconds, just looking, then lunged into her and her orgasms fell into each other like plush dominoes and she cried out “I can’t stop coming” and he said “Let me join you” and she could feel pulse as he drove himself into her in a last frenzy of lust.

When he rolled off her, he said “That was incredible.”

And she said, “Just wait.”

She slid down his stomach to give him the most intense, committed gluttonous grasping gulping blowjob either of them had ever experienced. She sucked harder when he finally came and he was shouting and screaming as she slipped her finger up inside him and found the spot she had read about in the sex manual when she was still trying to fix things with sex manuals. He arched up like a fish on a deck and twisted and writhed and pounded the sand with his fist.

Finally she slipped him out of her mouth and smiled sweetly.

“You’re mine now,” she said

She knew that she meant it, but she had absolutely no idea what it meant. She was about to find out at least part of what it meant, though. Sam had just crested the dune grass and was running toward them, across the beach.

Bullies Win (Mostly)

2010-08-23T04:40:00.001-07:00

What do Calvin & Hobbes author Bill Watterson, country singer Merle Haggard, and Gulf coast fisherman Mike Frenette have in common with my hapless next-door neighbor on Nantucket? They’ve all stood face-to-face with the bully culture of money in America, and felt the hand of power at their throats.

Merle Haggard, like so many musicians, signed brutal, confiscatory contracts with record labels just to get his music heard. He had no choice: they controlled the business and with that power came the opportunity, even the imperative, to exploit him. Musical artists who made millions for their labels died in poverty because of this rapacious disregard for their rights and disrespect for their talents. It’s still happening – only the rise of the internet threatens this hegemony in any long-term way: hence the Verizon/Google deal, and other scams, to control the freedom of the net and turns its immense potential for freedom of expression into profit. You can feel the fuming rage of the stymied power-brokers in the proposals they write and the bills they draft in Congress: how dare some nobody just post a video on YouTube and think millions of people will watch without having to pay for the privilege! The thought that some cocky little John Doe with a cellphone camera can post a picture that contradicts the news stories and the media narrative about some crucial event must make their blood boil. I remember when the video of Stephen Colbert’s Press Corps dinner speech was posted, amid the media spin that he had bombed: ten million hits on the video later, that particular lie was just another Colbert punch-line.

And now I read this on the AP news wire:

The latest guidelines for BP's $20 billion victims compensation fund say the nearer you are geographically to the oil spill and the more closely you depend on the Gulf of Mexico's natural resources, the better chance you have of getting a share of the money.Also, a second set of rules expected this fall will require that businesses and individuals seeking compensation for long-term losses give up their right to sue BP and other spill-related companies -- something that could save the oil giant billions.

The new rules for the claims process were released Friday by Washington lawyer Kenneth Feinberg, who was picked by President Barack Obama to run the fund and previously oversaw claims for 9/11 victims. Beginning Monday, the claims will be handled by Feinberg rather than BP, which is still footing the entire $20 billion bill.

I can’t think of any new story I’ve read in the last year that made me angrier than this one. “A second set of rules expected this fall” --?? Rules written by who? BP can just write new rules whenever they want, with no oversight? These people should be in jail, or better yet tarred and feathered (you can skip the feathers); instead they get to re-write the rules of their own reparations? Can’t the government stop this outrage? Isn’t the government supposed to be sticking up for the fishermen and business owners and ordinary citizens whose lives have been blighted by BP’s arrogance and ineptitude? No one stuck up for Merle Haggard or Frances Ballard, but this isn’t the back office of some cheesy record company, this is the United States of America, and the whole world is watching to see how we deal with the worst ecological disaster in modern history. But it turns out that it was the government itself, through Kevin Feinberg, the President’s hand-picked intermediary, who mandated these new rules. My sophisticated friends with PhDs laugh at me when I ramble on about “The Proprietors” –the corporations who seem to have turned the US Government into a wholly-owned subsidiary. But even these academic thinkers were given pause by the blatant collusion of Government and industry shamelessly paraded in the newspapers on Friday. And why should BP and the President be ashamed? No one condemns their actions, no one questions their motives, no one puts up a struggle … except the odd, ‘angry left’ blogger. We just get some Domino’s take-out and turn on the TV, instead. The Jersey Shore was hilarious this week. The Louisiana shore, not so much.

Which brings me to my neighbor, a smallish, humble, woman who rents one room in a chaotic house that could be the setting for Grey Gardens. You sense that she’s suffered a lot in her life; she’s accustomed to being a victim. How else could she endure the black mold on the walls and the black temper of her landlord? She’s not allowed to open her windows, she’s not allowed to clean up – any effort to turn the squalor around her into a livable home sends the owner into a howling temper tantrum, with insults -- and pots and pans -- flying. My neighbor says she can’t afford to move out. It may be true; I think she can’t afford to stay. The place is affecting her health. But her landlord senses this paralysis and preys on it with a relentless gusto that somehow reminds me of the much bigger predators at large in the world today. My son says I shouldn’t be surprised. We live in a country where the Founding Fathers obviously debated and compromised over what fraction of a human being a slave should be. You don’t get to “3/5ths” in a casual discussion. Perhaps we’re all just baboons, guarding our territory and shrieking at the intruders. The homeowners on Nantucket who build fences with locked gates on public- way paths to the beaches are no different than the Vanderbilts and Posts, using armed guards to keep city folk off the Long Island coastline in the 1920s. Sometimes it seems that nothing ever changes and the good guys never win.

Then you read about Bill Watterson.

When Calvin and Hobbes became hugely successful, the syndicate that sold the cartoon to the newspapers decided that they wanted to license the characters for merchandising: Calvin hats and Hobbes plush toys, and a million other iterations and trinkets. Watterson balked. He made the point that he didn’t want the issue of whether Hobbes was alive or not decided by a stuffed animal in a store window. Was he being a Prima Donna or a snob? Maybe, but it was his cartoon and his choice. The syndicate disagreed. They suggested he look at his contract – and indeed he had signed away all merchandising rights, just as the musicians signed away their royalties and the Louisiana fishermen will not doubt sign away their right to sue BP. Watterson tried to explain that when he signed the contract he wasn’t worried about the consequences and ramifications of Calvin and Hobbes becoming THE MOST SUCCESSFUL CARTOON OF ALL TIME. He just wanted to get one strip in one newspaper and pay his rent. Like Merle Haggard wanted to record “I Saw the Light” or that fisherman wants enough money from the people who destroyed his way of life to just keep on living.

The syndicate appreciated Watterson’s point, but told him it was moot. Watterson disagreed. What could he do about it? This: if they merchandised his characters, he would stop drawing the strip. He’d rather never do another Calvin and Hobbes panel than watch his work be hi-jacked by greedy corporate suits.

The syndicate said, fine, then -- we’ll get someone else to draw it.

And Watterson said – Good luck with that idea.

I guess they tried for a while. That’s the part I find most revealing and absurd and grotesque. These bean-counters were so blind to everything but money, so debased, so scrubbed clean of any vestige of aesthetic sense, so coarse, so mercenary and just so dumb, that they thought someone else could draw Calvin and Hobbes. It was just a product to them, a tool to generate income, a notation on the bottom line. But of course they couldn’t find anyone else to draw Calvin and Hobbes. And so eventually, they backed down. Amazingly, the little guy won. But as Watterson points out in the introduction to the boxed, three-volume edition of the cartoon, he had become pretty big himself, by then. And the victory was a costly one:

In hindsight, I see that, with so much money at stake, the artistic issues I argued about were irrelevant. In the end, it was simply might makes right. I was an unknown cartoonist when I started, and my contractual disadvantage reflected my nonexistent bargaining power when I got the job. Five years later, I was a big enough gorilla that I could turn the tables. Even though I finally got my way, the whole mess is depressing to recall, even all these years later. The fight was personally traumatic For several years it poisoned what had been a happy relationship with my syndicate, and in my disillusionment and disgust at being pushed to the wall, I lost the conviction that I wanted to spend the rest of my life cartooning. Both sides paid a heavy price for this battle.

I feel bad for Watterson, and I miss his brilliant cartoon, but I still find his triumph thrilling. It cheers and inspires me on my most angry despairing day, and I’m sure Mike Frenette and all the other fisherman fighting BP and the rock bands posting their albums on the internet, and even my sad and oppressed next-door neighbor would feel the same way if they knew what Bill Watterson did all those years ago, and they’d join me to celebrate what accomplished, and redouble their efforts to keep that accomplishment and the spirit of that victory alive. The bullies really do lose, sometimes.

It’s nice to remember that.

The Paint Whisperer: Disaster and Rescue

2010-08-07T04:50:00.001-07:00

The axis of evil in the house-painting trade: toxic liquids, divided attention and gravity. Not quite as deadly a trifecta as angry red-neck, cheap tequila and large automobile; not as insidious as uneducated citizen, PAC money and partisan TV ad … but still quietly awesome in its own way.

Here are some of my favorite paint calamities …and the inspired emergency responses that saved the day (or at least the final payment on the job)

The most common involve a bucket of paint tipping over on a redwood deck. Usually there’s a drop-cloth under the bucket, but unless the drop is backed with vinyl, the paint will soak right through (think: red wine through a silk table cloth). These calamities are also time sensitive, since the owner or the General Contractor could show up at any moment. The normal response is just to stare at the white puddle in dumb-founded panic. This is not the best clean-up strategy. It wastes precious seconds, and even without the imminent arrival of disapproving employers of one sort or another, every second counts. Paint is drying, soaking into the grain. ‘setting up’, doing its job. The solution, and this applies to any porous surface – bricks for instance, or cedar roof shingles – is dirt and paint thinner. Cleaning up with dirt – every kindergarten boy’s dream. But the dirt absorbs the paint and the thinner breaks it down. You get filthy, you waste several pounds of rags and a few quarts of mineral spirits (It’s always good to have several pounds of rags and a quart or two of mineral spirits on hand for just this purpose), you get a killer fume-headache …but it works. A friend of mine who didn’t understand this simple technique wound up digging out and turning over every brick in five square feet of sidewalk one summer morning. This was unnecessary and kind of crazy. It did work, though. An idiot who worked for me tried this system on grass – not a good idea. The grass got clean, but to call that a ‘superficial view’ of the situation is charitable at best – kind of like giving the Wicked Witch of the West a nice hot bath. The thinner soaks into the soil and kills everything. In that case we had to dig up a giant patch of lawn and dirt and re-sod the whole area before the customer showed up. This is a guy who looked at a can of Benjamin Moore “Navajo White” trim paint and said “What does Nava-joe mean?” You may say – well, sure, he was a house painter. Did you expect him to have an advanced degree? Well, everyone on my crew does, these days. That MFA in writing really helps when you have to improvise. And we all know that painting is a job, but the painting on your wall is a gerund. You can’t put a price on that.

A friend of mine slopped some paint into a new cedar roof. He took thinner and rags and spread it out over the whole surface, effectively ‘pickling’ the shingles. It sounds crazy, but so does punching a shark in the nose.

Years ago a summer kid was using a white pigmented shellac product called Bin to seal the knots on some second-storey trim. He had the quart can on the window sill, the window was open, there was beautiful couch right inside …and you can probably feel your stomach rolling already. The situation has a cartoon inevitability to it. And things get even better: we were at the far end of our little island, with no solvent alcohol on hand; that’s what you use to thin or clean up Bin. Oh, and in case you were wondering: this was before cell-phones. We were on our own in the middle of nowhere. The quart went over into the house, spilling white paint all over the couch. I thought we were doomed, but my boss knew a few things that I didn’t know. He had snooped the house and knew the owners had stocked it against some nameless emergency, with cans of soup, and bags of flour and other staples, shelved in the basement. Among the supplies were several cases of white vinegar … which he somehow knew was a viable solvent for shellac. This guy was old school: he didn’t panic, he just started shouting orders, while the crew dashed out to the van for rags and into the basement, up the stairs, racing against time: nothing dries as fast as Bin. That’s why carpenters like it so much. We flooded that couch, and cleaned it, and shampooed it … and got away with it.

I know it sounds like fun, but don’t try this at home, kids. This stuff is for professional stooges only.

The first dozen times paint catastrophes happened I freaked out; but I’ve gradually learned to take control of the situation and try to fix it, however hopeless things seem. Last summer we were painting a big house on one of the main streets in town, next door to an expensive restaurant. I had given a bid to the restaurant owner for his paint job, but he is spectacularly, radically, famously, comically cheap (He has a house in Montpelier and ignores the great restaurants there to eat at the Vermont College cafeteria, crowing that it’s “the best deal in town!”). He took my bid mainly to gloat over the money he was saving by using his dishwashing staff to do the work for minimum wage. They made a number of basic mistakes: painting with full buckets, not using vinyl-backed drop cloths, and not being careful about ladder placement. One of them set a step-ladder at the top of the steps, on the little deck by the front door. One leg was dangling in the air and when he started to climb, the whole thing went over, spilling oil paint on the stairs, the shingles and the bricks. His response: to run away, in his paint soaked sneakers. Working next door, I screamed at him to stay still. My friend and I swung into action – with the usual thinner and rags and plenty of dirt. We had it all cleaned up before the owner arrived. Weeks later, and I mean weeks, the thought occurred to me that we should have just let them try to fix it themselves: it would have been an excellent lesson for the cheapskate in the value of hiring professionals. But in the moment none of that mattered. Twenty years of dealing with these calamities had created a kind of lizard brain reflex in both of us. We could no more not clean up a paint spill than we could not take a breath coming up from under water. I thought we’d gotten away with it, too. But I saw the restauranteur at my next VCFA residency, waiting on line at the cafeteria. He winked and said “Thanks for the clean up.” His smile seemed to say “I’m cheap but I’m not stupid.”

But don’t get me wrong, this stuff can happen to anyone. One of the most experienced painters I know – from a family of painters – did exactly the same thing on the deck of what was, at that time, the most expensive house on Nantucket. The paint flooded the planks, the decorative stone work, the lawn and the lawn furniture. This time we didn’t have enough thinner or rags to fix the mess. Our boss had to buy new decking, new furniture, new sod, new stone work. The only good part was that this particular culprit, who had always been insufferably smug about his qualifications and pedigree as an old world tradesman, never said a dismissive word to anyone again.

Which wasn’t really fair. These disasters not only can happen to anyone, they will happen to everyone. That’s a guarantee, that’s the fate and predestination of physics, the merciless fact of life when you combine those three hilariously volatile elements: toxic fluids, divided attention and gravity. I always think of another friend, first day on the job: he didn’t attach his paint hook to his regrettably over-full bucket properly, and it fell twenty feet off the ladder to the sidewalk below. Even before it exploded onto the antique flagstones, all of us were thinking the same thing: There but for the grace of God go I. And Grace of God or not, it was only a matter of time before we wound up going there ourselves. Fortunately we didn’t have much time to ponder that idea.

We had some serious cleaning up to do.

Atlas Shrugged: The Movie?

2010-07-26T03:53:00.000-07:00

The ludicrous, appalling news came out on Saturday:

After nearly four decades of development hell, a movie adaptation of Ayn Rand's doorstop novel Atlas Shrugged finally went into production this past weekend. If you're a Rand fan who had been patiently waiting for years for a quality film based on the book, prepare to be disappointed: The picture, which will tell only half of the epic story, is being helmed by One Tree Hill actor Paul Johansson, who will direct and star as the mysterious industrialist John Galt. Johansson took the gig at the last minute, since producer John Aglialoro would have lost the rights to the novel if the film hadn't entered production by last Saturday, with almost no prep time, a rushed production schedule, a relatively tiny $5 million budget, and a cast of unknowns.

I sighed when I read that press release. But I go back a long way with Ayn Rand’s magnum opus.

Like many people I first read the book in high school, where I was swept up into its binary view of human existence -- the geniuses versus the boobs. Of course, I identified with the genius contingent – the Hank Reardons and Francisco D’Anconias, rather than the boobs, whose very names were a form of moral onomatopoeia: Wesley Mouch, Kip Chalmers and – my personal favorite – Balph (“Not Ralph,” he tells everyone around him, “Balph!”) Eubanks.

I sensed even then that the book had major problems from a screenwriter’s point of view as well as a literary critic’s – all the geniuses fleeing the world seemed to sound exactly alike, in ways that say … Leonard Bernstein, Lee Iacocca and Pablo Picasso, probably wouldn’t. Or, as a random update … take Steve Jobs, Billy Collins and Philip Glass – what are the chances they’d be standing around in some top secret Colorado valley barking out Ayn Rand’s philosophy and finishing each other’s sentences?

I’d say, close to zero.

Then there’s the speeches … not two or three page soliloquies – I’m talking about ten or fifteen page slabs of indigestible didactic ‘kwonking’ – a term my father coined years ago for the sounds made by veteran bores …or the grown-ups in animated Peanuts cartoons. As the inimitable Sam Goldwyn remarked many years ago, “Arias went out with Shakespeare” And that’s not even counting the endless reiterations and redundancies of John Galt’s dreaded final lecture to a captive audience of American boobs reduced to the Stone Age by the disappearance of Galt and his elitist cronies.

Ever more problematical was the setting. In 1957, Ayn Rand was writing about the future … but that future looks as antique as an issue of Life Magazine from 1977 right now. Ayn Rand’s ‘future’ doesn’t work, and setting the book in the past is futile because the past never resembled her America, either.

What a quandary.

Ultimately, I stopped caring, because I got sick of Rand herself and her pre-Tea Party libertarian politics. But I always followed the film-making attempts with a mild rooting interest. There are great dramatic moments in the novel – when Dagny Taggart trades her diamond bracelet for the ‘clunky’ piece of Reardon Metal jewelry that Reardon’s icky wife is sneering at during a big party; Reardon and D’Anconia stopping the steel mill ‘break out’; the bum telling Dagny the story of the ruined car company where Galt designed his motor; the young physicist working on Galt’s unfinished formula seeing three months of work erased from the blackboard by a janitor …and replaced by a single perfect equation. Yes, Galt is the janitor, and if that sound suspiciously like Good Will Hunting, take it as an homage. There’s so much more: Galt’s torture scene, where the machine breaks and he instructs his clueless interrogators how to fix it; the first run on the John Galt Line, the perfect hamburger made by the exile philosophy professor in a Colorado greasy spoon, because he can’t doing anything .less than perfectly (even grilling a burger).

So, as various deals to make the movie rose and were shot down over the years (kind like skeet), I kept thinking g about arranging all these good scenes, cutting out the stupid stuff and the speeches, and stringing a tight, exciting story line out of them. Of course, I knew no one would ever hire me to do that and even if they did, the Rand estate would never allow such radical changes.

Whatever.

But I was particularly irked recently, when I realized exactly how they could update the story, using the railroads. We need our railroads now. They represent our greatest infrastructure investment and asset. Building the John Galt line would be a stroke of political genius today, and at least a partial solution to our connected problems of fossil fuel addiction and global warming. You don’t have to set Atlas Shrugged in the real past or Ayn Rand’s future. You could set in the present and make it unexpectedly relevant at the same time.

Oh well.

That’s not going to happen. No, they held out for the TV pretty boy’s five million dollar vanity project.

And I have to say, it feels like poetic justice.

Seriously: for thirty-five years, Ayn Rand herself, and then the Ayn Rand estate has guarded the book with such virulent orthodoxy and paranoia, turning down a virtual Who’s Who of talented writers and directors over the years because they threatened to change one word of the holy text, that no film or TV series had ever come close to production. Even the effort before this more recent one, with a script no less a screenwriter than Randall Wallace (Braveheart) and a stellar cast that was said to include Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, fizzled over questions of length and content. And now, because of this relentless, almost feral posture of steely eyed unflinching integrity, the book is going to wind up as a hopelessly compromised piece of inept, straight-to-DVD trash.

Wesley Mouch would be proud.

But it makes me sad for Ayn Rand. That obsessed, brilliant, batty old dame deserves a whole lot better.

A New Demographic For the iPad

2010-07-26T03:51:00.000-07:00

So I was sitting with my soon-to-be-ninety-year old mother in her room at Our Island Home, trying to teach her how to use her new lap-top. I had already failed with the iPod – the concept of turning a dial with your finger tip to scroll down a list may seem ‘organic’ and ‘intuitive’ to my twenty-five year old son. For his grandmother it’s simply impossible. The main problem overlaps with our laptop computer conundrum: she just doesn’t have the manual dexterity to spin a dial precisely, or guide a cursor from a touch pad. She has no conceptual difficulty – she’s no Luddite. She used the big Apple desktop computer my brother bought for her in Long Beach. She cruised the internet, e-mailed her friends, even downloaded the occasional symphony on iTunes. She could handle a mouse in those days.

She still loves the game; she just can’t pass the physical.

As a result, she’s off-line and even more isolated from friends and family. The problem seemed insoluble, just one more checkmate in her on-going chess-game with mortality. But the solution was right in front of us. Tired of the lesson I said, “Can you just go to the X in the upper right hand corner and close the program?” She abandoned the touch pad and simply touched the X with her finger. Nothing happened of course, except inside my head. It was suddenly so obvious. Her intuitive response was to touch the screen. My mom needed an iPad It’s the perfect technology for her, eliminating the ordered, indirect commands and physical manipulation of the controls. Yes, computing has gotten so sophisticated, so intricate and complex, that it’s finally simple enough for my mother to use.

This is a huge breakthrough, a tremendous liberation. I called my brother; he agreed to buy the iPad. Mom should have it in a week or two. We’re very happy, but somehow I don’t think this little story will ever make it into an iPad commercial. This is definitely not the cool demographic Apple is trying to seduce. Yet for most of the prosperous, college-educated consumers Apple covets – people who own a smart phone and a laptop and even a Kindle – there’s no real use for the gorgeous tablet computer, except as a high-end toy. The text doesn’t use e-ink; the movies are hard to watch in certain light, they don’t synch well to other machines, won’t charge with a USB connection to a PC … etc etc. None of that matters to my mother, for whom simplicity and ease of use trump every other consideration. It’s a shame Apple can’t run an ad about this – ‘The Computer for People Who Hate Computers” or “Think Young” or maybe, best of all -- “The Little old Lady from Cuppertino” (I’m sure Jan and Dean would go along, for a free iPad or two of their own).

I can’t get the song out of my head: go granny, go granny, go granny go.

Thanks to the brand new shiny red super stock dodge of a tablet computer, the granny in my family is on her way.

Why TV is Better Than the Movies

2010-07-20T12:43:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I eagerly ordered a few seasons of The Man from U.N.C.L.E, one of my favorite television shows when I was a kid. I remembered sleek sets, cool villains, glamorous action set pieces. My memory was kind. The actual show looked almost comically cheesy and awful forty years later. Those were the days when television was derided as “the vast wasteland”, and though there were some quality offerings – The Defenders. Paladin, I Spy, The Twilight Zone – most of what the networks were offering between the cigarette ads was low-budget dreck. An actor who moved from films to TV was committing career suicide, and even in the mid-eighties, when unknown bartender Bruce Willis scored the lead in Moonlighting, the idea that he could jump to features – and for the impossible, unbelievable payday of five million dollars – was shocking and bizarre.

Well, times have changed.

As the quality of big studio Hollywood movies declines, television has become the venue of choice for the most talented writers, actors and directors in Hollywood. There are a number of reasons for this. Television has always been a writer-dominated business, with directors – especially in comedy – playing a secondary role. The rise of cable further enhanced this hierarchy. When the great Matthew Weiner, whose show Mad Men starts its eagerly awaited fourth season on Sunday night, said in the Emmy- award acceptance speech. “The difference between me and the rest of you is that I have complete creative freedom” it was like a battle cry. The quality of work that such unfettered inspiration produced over the last decade – from The Sopranos, Six feet Under and The Wire to Weeds, Dexter and Treme – has made most of the films produced in this era look puny and venal by comparison.

The idea of letting creative people do their work unmolested had gradually seeped into Network television, also, from The West Wing to Friday Night Lights, both of which are as good as anything on cable, and in some ways better since the demands of a network show are so much greater. Treme’s first season consisted of ten episodes, written by a brilliant team. A The West Wing season demanded more than twice as much work -- twenty-two episodes, most of them written by one crazy, drug-fueled genius, though Aaron Sorkin did have a staff of writers and a group of political experts to suggest story lines and make sure the details were accurate.

Now film actors are happy to do television. Glen Close had flourished on Damages and David Caruso was lucky to get back onto CSI Miami after a string of forgettable films.

This shouldn’t be anything new: the real explanation for television’s new ascendancy has been an intrinsic part of the medium, all along. The first hint of television’s narrative superiority over the movies came with the adaptations of two Irwin Shaw novels. An unjustly neglected writer these days, Shaw was a wildly famous and profligate best-selling author from the forties until his death in 1984. His big World War Two novel, The Young Lions, was made into a pretty good film with Marlon Brando playing a disaffected Nazi and Montgomery Clift as a Jewish soldier. Like most films made from books, it was inevitably a disappointment to both the writer and his fans: so much left out, altered, elided – so much lost in translation.

In the seventies ABC did a mini-series based on another Shaw novel, Rich Man, Poor Man. It was a huge hit an inspired other ‘long form’ productions – like Roots and The Winds of War.

Clearly, this was the way to honor a novel and do justice to the complexities of its character and story-lines. In the eighties Television started exploring this concept more and more, though without the burden of adaptation. Shows like Hill Street Blues, L.A.Law and E.R. seemed to be using the techniques of soap opera in their continuing story lines, but the hystrionics and clichés that characterized ‘daytime drama’ were wholly absent from these more sophisticated shows. They worked like literature, showing characters and situations developing over time, with multi-layered subplots, let-motifs and ambiguous resolutions to problems TV had rarely bothered with before – the aftermath of a police shooting, for instance, or the conflict of conscience for an abortion provider.

The great series we’re watching now, like Mad Men, are the logical continuation of this process. Though a contract dispute or a cocaine conviction can throw a series into confusion and mediocrity, though at the networks, ratings and censors and advertisers can skew the content of a show, for the most part these programs survive; and some of them triumph. We are living through a golden age of television right now – a mass medium that triumphed precisely because it chose to narrow the appeal of its shows, even as movie studios seek to reach the largest possible audience with the most possible explosions and the broadest narrative gestures. Television – whose early hedgemony was shattered by cable and the internet – has learned to embrace the niche audience. A million people watch Mad Men each week. That’s a slim movie audience and a catastrophically tiny network one. But it’s enough for Weiner. He’s not playing to -- or writing for -- the crowd, he’s not trying to hit every demographic, and every ‘quadrant’ of some hypothetical test audience.

He just wants the smart people.

And he gets them, like the rest of this new elite: Sorkin and the three Davids: Simon(The Wire, Treme) Chase (The Sopranos), and Milch (Deadwood). These are the new auteurs, and their work is the stuff that will hold up forty years from now, when the comic book adaptations, sequels and star vehicles special effects extravaganzas are long forgotten. It’s a tough truth to absorb, especially if you’re in the 100 million dollar movie business, but as Don Draper memorably pointed out to Peggy Olson in the first episode of Mad Men’s second season,

"Just so you know, the people who talk that way think that monkeys can do this. They take all this monkey crap and just stick it in a briefcase completely unaware that their success depends on something more than their shoeshine. YOU are the product. You- FEELING something. That's what sells. Not them. Not sex. They can't do what we do, and they hate us for it."

But we love you, Don, and we await the next season of Mad Men just as we anticipate the new Jonathan Franzen novel or the American readers lined up on the dock for the next installment of Little Dorritt. The novel isn’t dead – it’s alive and dangerously robust, and television of all things, that ‘great wasteland’ that gave us Hee Haw and The Dukes of Hazzard, proves that extraordinary fact beyond the shadow of a doubt.

It’s an irony Dickens himself would have appreciated.

The Road to Publication, Part One

2010-07-20T12:42:00.000-07:00

It’s a long, washed out, pot-holed road that goes in circles, or takes weird detours to cliff edges or turns into muddy dirt and disappears into the scrub. But I’m cruising it again now, for better or worse, and I thought it might be interesting to document the journey. If this particular stretch of cracked macadam winds up at a sinkhole or a chain-link fence with big NO TRESSPASSING signs, so be it.

The trip may still be interesting.

I’ve traveled this route before. Three years ago I cold-queried an agent with a different book: Owners, the one I’ve been posting on Open Salon for the last month or so. The novel was set on Nantucket and this agent loved the island. She asked to see pages but felt uneasy when I told her the book was incomplete. Still, she liked what she read. We worked together for a few months, but she was having a baby and getting out of the business. She passed me on to a New York agent she knew. I worked with this guy for a year, finishing and revising-- and then he sent my nicely buffed and polished 92,000 words out on auction to twelve publishers.

I was riding high.

Then they all rejected it … and he retired.

I went from having a hot book and a big-time agent to having an un-publishable pile of pages and no representation -- in less than two weeks. Career whiplash happens on the road to publication: fasten your seatbelts.

I’m obviously hoping this time will be different. I have a few more advantages now. Some I earned – like my MFA degree; some I didn’t: like my name. After many cold queries and very few requests for pages and no real progress I finally decided to query my father’s agent. I had met him at Dad’s memorial service and he seemed like a decent guy. A Google search proved he was a major player in Hollywood. It felt like cheating but I no longer cared.

Here’s the query letter I sent out to all those agents (It took slightly less time to write than the book itself):

HEAT OF THE MOMENT, complete at 78,500 words, tells the story of an ordinary high school English teacher whose obsessive sexual passion for a student drives him to statutory rape, blackmail, grand larceny and finally murder. Invoking novels like James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity and Josephine Hart’s Damage, as well as a history of film noir movies from The Blue Angel to Body Heat, the hero of HEAT OF THE MOMENT is always at least two steps behind his teen-age femme fatale, never fully aware of her actual intentions until it’s much too late. At the end of the book, after destroying a man’s life and getting away with it, she has the bad luck to cross paths with the serial killer and snuff-film auteur whose exploits have formed a counter-point to the main story. His wry “You’re pretty enough to be in the movies” makes it clear she’s met her match, at last: barracuda vs. shark.

Part crime thriller, part cautionary tale, this journey into the land of worst possible outcomes would be a hellish trip to experience, but (I hope) a perversely entertaining one to read.

I'm a member of the WGA(west), with numerous script options and assignments( from such production companies as Hemdale, Tetragram, Concorde New Horizons, Howard International, and Arama) behind me, but no screen credits yet. I recently received my MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and have built a modest but discernible readership (as much as 3000 hits for my most popular posts) on Open Salon. Several of my essays have been featured at Salon.com, including recent eulogy for Robert B. Parker and a belated valentine to the NFL. If you'd like to see all or any part of the book, let me know.

Thanks for your time and attention –

The query netted a variety of responses over the next few months, but the main reaction was silence. Personally, I prefer that. I send out masses of queries, to names picked out of a fat paperback guide to agents, and I promptly forget about them. If they’re not interested in me, the last thing I want is to be reminded of their irksome, critical existence. It’s a kind of arrogance, anyway -- this assumption that they’re important enough for me to be hanging on breathlessly to read their comments.

Anyway, in the interests of full disclosure, (and vicarious entertainment) here are a few of the more interesting responses:

Thanks for sending along those opening pages of HEAT OF THE MOMENT. The writing is great and it certainly held my attention, but this one is just a bit too creepy for most of the editors with whom I regularly do business and I worry that the lack of sympathetic characters will further limit its appeal. I’m going to pass with some reservations. Another agent may know just the right editor but unfortunately I don’t.

I am going to turn you down for strictly personal, arbitrary, some would say snotty reasons. I hope you receive my comments as nothing more damning than had I written "I prefer Indian food to Italian."

I think you've crafted a plot that would appeal to a number of agents.

But, as a reader (and thus as an agent) I am more steeped in reality based writing than a plot twisting page turner. The meeting one of Susan's previous victims in rehab and especially the revelation that the whole scenario was actually her machinations for someone else to take the fall for murdering her father may well work for a best selling novel and film, but it hits my reading taste buds as artifice I just can't buy into. I could say the same thing about 90% of the books on The New York Times bestseller list.

Please don't change a comma on my account. You simply need to find the right agent.

I appreciate your sending over the manuscript; I read into it, and you definitely do what you do nicely. But it feels much more like a modern thriller than the sort of classical hardboiled/noir crime fiction we look for, and these days we have so few slots that we really have to focus on books that fall right in our sweet spot. I wish you all the best with it -- but we're going to pass.

I made the crucial mistake of answering this rejection. On the road to publication that’s like doing a fast lane change without signaling or checking your blindspot. It tends to irritate the other drivers.

Here’s our subsequent e-mail exchange:

Me:
Thanks for the quick response ... I understand your view, but the story does evolve into much more of what I think you want ...and as the book came out a little too long for the series, some of the early part could be cut for pace. I don't mean to presume on your time or your patience, but I now regret not sending the 1,100 word synopsis. It would have to given a sense of the bigger picture. I'm pasting it below, so you can take a look if you have time. Anyway -- thanks for your courtesy and attention.

Him:

I don't doubt that what you say is true -- it might evolve into all sorts of things. But if the opening isn't right for us, our readers will never get to find out what it evolves into, since they'll put the book down, the same way I did. I don't mean to be harsh, but I figure it's best to be honest. I hear this all the time from people -- "The book has a great ending!" or "Just wait till you get to chapter 8, it's amazing!" Well, maybe. But I'll only get to chapter 8 if I find chapters 1 through 7 compelling.

Could it be cut? Could it be edited? Sure; any book could. But what I've got to look at is what you sent.

And in the 10 days since you sent the book to me, I've received 20-30 other books by other writers, all of whom as just as eager for us to publish them and all of whom have passion for their books, and most of whose books are also perfectly good (if not necessarily right for us). Most likely the answer will be no to every one of them -- and to the next 30, and the 30 after that -- and that means I can only spend so much time on any of them.

Apologies again if I'm coming across as a jerk -- I don't mean to -- but the only way I can survive the flood of incoming submissions is to read quickly, make the best decisions I can, and move on.

Ouch!

Note to self: don’t do that again.

The rest of the responses were just the usual “Not for us” rejections, but my final effort produced this note:

Thank you for following up with us. We're very excited to read the sensuous, drug-filled adrenaline narrative you've whipped up. Godspeed on any concurrent projects, Steven, and have a great rest of the week.

That sounded refreshingly positive. It was written by an assistant, but I Googled her and saw that she was a cool twenty-something with her own web-site and some sharply written flash fiction published in various e-zines.

To proceed with the submission, I had to download an agency document giving all kinds of waivers and permissions and promising not to sue them under a variety of what I can only call drastically litigation-appropriate situations. No problem: I’ve signed these release forms before. I never got around to filling this one out, though, because my Dad’s agent sent me this short e-mail:

I'd love to take a look at the first 100 pages - can we do that?

I didn’t have much hope at that point; nepotism usually backfired somehow, and it was frowned on in my family, anyway. I remembered my Dad’s favorite anecdote about Verdi’s son, who wrote a requiem mourning his father and gave it to the old man’s music publisher, whose devastating response was: “You should have died. Your father should have written the requiem.”

But it was worth a try, and it turned out to be the real beginning, the on-ramp to a road I hadn’t traveled in quite a while.

Pack a lunch -- we’ll start the trip together, next time.

American Idol: Some Questions About the Finale

2010-06-03T03:29:00.000-07:00

The show's two hour blow out rivals "Lost" for it's cluster of bizarre mysteries and unanswered questions.

Inquiring minds want to know:

How does Paula really feel about Simon Cowell and the show? She was teary-eyed, one minute, and insutingly bitter the next (What was that line about the man boobs?). Anyway, it was nice to see some unstable craziness back on center stage.

How is Brett Michaels even walking around? Wasn't he basically dead a week ago?

How many of the midwestern tween speed-dial monsters who made what-his-name the most forgettable Idol since Taylor Hicks have actually heard of Joe Cocker, or The bee Gees, or Hall and Oates ... or even Alanis Morissette (isn't she that actess from Weeds?)-- or even Janet Jackson? (She's so Twentieth Century).

How short is Ryan Seacrest? And how smarmy and annoying can he be without actually imploding?

Where the hell was David Cook? I mean --seriously. Did his Mom just die? Did his visa expire when he was in Africa with Idol Gives Back? Every winner from the show was there, except him, and he was my favorite. So what's up? They never mentioned him. He's an unperson.

What the hell happened to Kelly Clarkson? She looked fat and exhausted and miserable. And how did they coerce her onto the show? I hope it wasn't by force-feeding her Mars bars.

What the hell was Carrie Underwood wearing? It looked like the failed haut couture effort of some bitter Project Runway loser on the week when they had to make clothes out of kitchen items ("I started with tin foil and cut up some pot holders ... it makes a statement, I don't care what the judge think.")

Speaking of Carrie ... what was up with that horrible song? A stutter is not a hook.

And can Kara write music, or is that collaboration with Carrie really the best she can do? What would Simon have said about it ("If this was a thousand years ago, they'd have stoned you to death.")

Didn't Ellen deGeneres used to be funny? Or was that her evil twin. And why are the evil ones so much more entertaining?

What the hell was Simon saying about the audience being the greatest judges? From season one where they booted Tamyra Grey to last night when they snubbed a major talent and gave Mr. potato head the crown, they have proven themselves to be infantile, tone deaf and idiotic over and over again.

Speaking of Simon ...

How do they think they can have show without him?

The New Technology; Three Game-Changers

2010-06-03T03:27:00.000-07:00

The new buzz word in the Silicon Valley is “Simplify” and these three astonishing innovations tackle that techno-geek mantra, update it, reboot it, up-grade it and turn it into a philosophy, a wikipedia of personal style and ultimately, nothing less than a cutting-edge, steam-punk state-of-the art way of life! The past is the future and the future is now. So let’s get started, before Wired Magazine scoops us!

First of all, the retro masterpiece I’m calling the MePhone. Are you sick of the brain-tumor causing, relentlessly nagging, ubiquitous bleeping and vibrating cell phone? Are you sick of being pestered anywhere and any time by anyone with your name on a call list? Do you long for the days when your telephone was stuck in your house where it belongs, tethered to the wall, and you could actually hear the person you were talking to? Have you ever thought to yourself … I’d gladly trade in all my GPS triangulations, fart apps and youTube videos just to be able to get a clear connection? If so, then the gloriously chunky new MePhone is the product for you. Featuring a heavy ‘receiver’ you can actually slam down on a ‘cradle’ to ‘hang up on’ people who irritate you (just like Mom and Pop used to do) and a old fashioned ‘dial’,complete with little metal comma that stops your finger when each number’s spin is finished. It lets you feel the weight of the digits as they rotate back to rest with that series of clicks that tells you – "speed dial is so totally over!” Press four if you want to speak Spanish? Not any more! The day of punching buttons to talk to computers and hang-up robots is ancient history. Dial up a new era.

But you say, the MePhone doesn’t store phone numbers. Our next device solves that problem handily! The iPen actually uses a flow of liquid ink – not e-ink, but real, messy, paper-soaking, finger- staining gallatannate ink – which flows out with pressure of the nib on paper. This amazing tool requires no batteries, no charge, no wireless connection. You can take it anywhere, drop it in the bath water or onto the sandy beach, and it keeps on working. You’ll discover that you have something called ‘handwriting’ – a unique shape to the letters of the words you form with your iPen, a personal signature more unique than the one you’ll put at the bottom of your iPen contract. Is it more slow and difficult than dancing your fingers over a computer keyboard? Well, that’s the point. Slow down, feel each word. Dot the ‘I’s and cross the ‘T’s – you can finally do that. You can also doodle in the margins, scratch words out and just play. The iPen is mightier than the sword (Just jab it in your enemy’s eye). The writing is on the wall!

Finally we come to the long awaited answer to the e-book revolution. Finally a reader that never needs a single erg of electricity, that you can drop off a ten story building with breaking it, one you can mark up with your iPen to your heart’s content. It’s called … wait for it … ‘The Book”. This durable, take-anywhere item brings back the forgotten joy of actually turning pages. Not animated pages on a touch screen, but real, paper pages hinged into a stitched binding that smells of dusty leather, old summer houses and your childhood. Does this radical innovation spell the end of the Kindle, the Nook and the iPad? I’d say the future is ‘booked’ solid.

Next week: The abacus!

Misunderstood American Masters #3: Thornton Wilder

2010-05-01T17:46:00.001-07:00

When Annie told me she was going to play Mrs. Webb in a local production of Our Town, I tried to talk her out of it. She’s trying to get a story collection ready for a Memorial Day prize submission deadline, and plays eat time like stoners eat Cracker Jack. But it wasn’t just that. I had seen Our Town when my high school mounted the play in 1967, and I remembered it as corny, sentimental small town schmaltz – hardly worth learning all those lines, wasting two months of rehearsals and giving up all those balmy Spring nights for.

I wonder about that initial reaction now, having been marinated for weeks in the words of Thornton Wilder, running lines and watching various versions of the play. My memory might have been playing tricks on me; or maybe I was just too young to really appreciate the harsh truth and the austere beauty of what may just be the Great American Play. As the Stage Manager, says, discussing the time-capsule cornerstone for the new bank being built in Grovers Corners, New Hampshire:

…Y’know Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ‘m is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts and – the sales of slaves. Yes, every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney -- same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then. So I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone, so the people a thousand years from now’ll know a few simple facts about us – more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight. See what I mean? So – people a thousand years from now – this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the Twentieth Century – this is the way we were – in our growing up and in our marrying, and in our living and in our dying.

The play is deceptively simple. Its three acts show a day in the life of Grover’s Corners New Hampshire, circa 1901; the marriage of George Webb and Emily Gibbs, three years later; and a graveyard scene nearly a decade after the wedding. The production design is minimalist, to say the least. At one point stage-hands roll a trellis into view “For those of you who feel you have to have scenery,” the Stage Manager remarks. He’s a curious conceit, this Stage Manager. He narrates the play, comments on the action like a one man Greek Chorus. But the characters on stage are aware of him; they talk to him. At his request, Mr. Webb, the editor of the town newspaper, steps up to deliver the “political and social report” on the town for the audience. Mr. Webb is aware of the audience, too, it seems – he even takes questions from them. His wife and her neighbor, Julia Gibbs come and go at The Stage Manager’s command. He thanks them for their ‘scene’ – at once a purely realistic conversation and a Pirandello-esque exercise in theatrical self-awareness. Are these actors talking to their “Stage Manager” – as actors? Or is it the characters themselves talking to … the author? Us? God? The mystery resonates through the play, an unanswered question that renders Our Town strikingly, almost abrasively, modern, for all its apparent folksiness old-fashioned charm.

The Stage Manager certainly has an omniscient point of view. Telling us about Joe Crowell, the newsboy, he says:

Joe was awful bright – graduated from High School here, head of his class. So he got a scholarship to Massachusetts Tech – MIT. Graduated head of his class there, too. It was all wrote up in the Boston paper at the time. Goin to be a great engineer, Joe was, but the war broke out and he died in France. Yes sir, all that education for nothing. What business he had picking a quarrel with the Germans, we can’t make out to this day, hut it all seemed pretty clear to us at the time.

He sees the future, he leads the dead Emily Gibbs briefly back into the world of the living at the climax of the third act and most of all he helps us see the long view, the great context in which these characters lives are set. It comes out in so many details, at almost every moment of the play, from the Stage Manager (marrying George and Emily in Act Two) talking about the “other witnesses” – the ancestors, “millions of them” to George’s sister Rebecca telling him about a letter her friend got from the Minister when she was sick. She says the address on the envelope read like this: “Jane Crofut, the Crofut Farm, Grover’s Corners, Sutton County; Neew Hampshire; the United states of America; continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; The Earth; The Solar System; The Universe; The Mind of God. And the postman brought it, just the same.”

In a letter to his friend Alexander Woolcott, dated January 27th, 1938, Wilder laid his intentions out clearly:

Our reviews say that it is a nostalgic unpretentious play with charm. But what I wrote was damn pretentious…The subject of the play I wrote is: the trivial details of human life in reference to a vast perspective of time, of social history, of religious ideas … if it had been written as a picture of rural manners, it would have been written differently … [Stage manager actor Frank Craven] is lovable and we’re grateful for that. But, oh, for that deep New England stoic irony that’s grasped the iron of life and shares it with the house.

In fact the play is anything but sentimental. It’s harsh, it’s brutal. It’s merciless, in a way. No one gets what they want. Emily Webb, who loves to give speeches (“It was like silk off a spool”) and thinks she’ll do it all her life, marries a farmer nowhere near as bright as she is and dies in childbirth at age thirty. Her brother Wally dies on a Boy Scout trip when he’s barely a teen-ager. Her mother-in-law, Julia Gibbs, never achieves her life-long dream of going to Paris, France (“Only it seems to me, once in your life, you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and they don’t even want to.”) She sells a valuable piece of furniture but that money doesn’t pay for a trip abroad. It goes to buying her son a trough for the farm livestock. She does get to make her husband French toast, though. We only realize the ultimate disposition of Mrs. Gibbs’ ‘legacy’ at the end of the play when both she and her daughter-in-law are dead and sitting in the graveyard and it shouldn’t matter any more. But it still hurts. Even the fact that Emily loves the trough, with its modern automatic drain and refill, wounds us somehow. She settled for so much less than she should have had.

But still she wants to go back. The other shades advise her against it, but she insists, and the Stage Manager with an inscrutable deference, allows her to re-live her twelfth birthday. In perhaps the most moving and justly famous moment of the play, she finds it unbearable, and flees back to the grave yard. She says:

I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave. But first; Wait! One more look! Goodbye! Goodbye, world! Goodbye, Grover’s Corners – Mama and papa – Goodbye to clocks ticking – and my butternut tree! – and mama’s sunflowers – and food and coffee – and new ironed dresses and hot baths – and sleeping and waking up! – Oh Earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you. (to The Stage Manager) Do any humans ever realize life while they live it, every, every minute

And he says, “No. Saints and poets maybe. They do, some.”

Maybe the Stage Manger is right when he quotes the ‘scholars’ who believe there’s nothing living above us, among the stars, “just chalk – or fire.” But elsewhere in the play he says there’s “something eternal about every human being” and you feel that when you watch the play and you feel it in the play itself, still vivid and moving and troubling more than seventy years after it was written, thirty five years after the author’s death. Despite the harshness of life, despite its cruel twists of fate, its mean compromises and its relentless defeats, without a scrap or filament of the sentimentality for which it has so often been derided, Our Town shakes us awake for a moment or two, makes us really look at the world outside the theatre, feel the mild night air around us, take the hand of the person we love beside us, reach for that sainthood of awareness, that elusive poetry of now.

Misunderstood American Masters #2: Norman Rockwell

2010-05-01T16:43:00.000-07:00

If one picture is worth a thousand words, then any randomly selected Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover could replace pages of scornful academic writing about the spiritual danger of kitsch and the aesthetic disease of sentimentality. For most people, Rockwell defines ‘corny’. He’s become a generic term, the commercial branding for the fake and the trite. Kleenex means facial tissue, Thermos means vacuum flask; and Rockwell means cheese.

Rockwells’s paintings are lies – the world he depicts never existed. Doctors never humored little girls by giving stethoscope examinations to their dolls; jovial policemen never sat chatting at the soda counter with cute runaway little boys (complete with all belongings tied into a scarf at the end of a stick). Boy Scouts may indeed salute the flag, but not generally while standing in front of the Liberty Bell. When members of the tea-party movement whine about taking their country back, this is the country they’re talking about – the idealized, homey, sugar sweet middle America of Normal Rockwell. But no one likes a steady diet of sweets and this man’s work could put a hypo-glycemic into a diabetic coma.

That’s the critical consensus as we move tentatively into the second decade of the twenty-first century.

I won’t say it’s wrong, but I will say it’s wrong headed. It’s simplistic. It’s incomplete. Of course he produced hundreds, even thousands of sentimental icons – gossips and baseball players and big turkey dinners: that was his job. He was an illustrator, and he was proud to be an illustrator. He was one of the best, ever. But he was also an artist, and he could have been a great one, right up there with Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer, if he had made different choices. No, you can’t deny the cascade of saccharine imagery, revealing what Orwell referred to as “A talent that extends no farther then the wrist”. Orwell was talking about Salvadore Dali, about whom who Nabokov famously remarked that he was “Norman Rockwell abducted by gypsies as a child.” But there are other pictures, only few, perhaps, but more than enough of them to rehabilitate his reputation, where the purity of his feeling and the skill of his art came together like a storm surf wave hitting the backwash from the steep beach, and lifting into something wild and unique and unrepeatable.

I have always been haunted by a painting called “Shuffleton’s Barbershop”, which depicts a pick-up nighttime jam session in the back room of titular Vermont establishment, just glimpsed through an open door. Part of it is the detail, the hanging clippers, the leaning broom, the old fashioned barber chairs slumbering in the late autumn darkness. It seems like late autumn in that painting, with the fire smoldering in the woodstove. And then there’s the sense of small town intimacy, together with the sharp spike of exclusion: we are staring through the window-mullions that subtly frame the image, perhaps drawn by the faint sound of fiddle music, eternally on the outside, looking in. It’s a vision of community, with a note of isolation like a minor key change from that bluegrass violin. You want to try the lock, (of course the shop will be open), slip inside, and listen for a while. But you start off down the deserted street again, buttoning the top button of your coat. Winter is coming on. There’s a chilly wind blowing off the mountains.

Then there’s “Freedom from Fear”, the second and most affecting of Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” series. Though not the most famous – the praying heads, gaunt working man standing up to make a point at town meeting, the giant roast turkey brought to the table by the smiling grandma (“Freedom to Worship”, “Freedom of Speech”, “Freedom from Want”) are all better known – and more simplistic. It’s hard to imagine Rockwell’s craggy proletarian rising to fight the Domestic Partnership article on the warrant, or a squabbling miserable family, barely assembled and bickering, at that Thanksgiving table. Do any of those worshipping folk have an abused alter-boy in the family? I don’t think so. That’s not Rockwell’s world. But just when Rockwell’s world begins to seem hopelessly, absurdly, cornball, he gives the one more picture in the series: a mother and father tucking their two small children into bed for the night. There’s no hype in this picture, none of the forced sentimentality that mars the other pictures: the father didn’t even put his newspaper down before joining his wife in the nightly ritual (they had evening newspapers in those days). But it speaks volumes to me -- and, I suspect, to every other parent who has had the privilege of performing that simple daily ceremony.

Finally, I love Rockwell’s clear-eyed and unblinking conscience, his tough, New England political acuity (The “Middle America” slight was always a few thousand miles off: he lived in Stockbridge, Massachusetts). Look at his de-segregation painting, “Problem We All Live With”. A negro girl (this was 1964, the cover of Look Magazine) walks to school in what is obviously her best white dress, clutching her books, surrounded with a four-man honor guard to protect her from the rabid bigots just out of the picture (about where we’re standing, looking at the painting, actually). The work is rendered subtly from her point of view, though presented at some distance from the stark parade. Rockwell’s image emerges from the little girl’s height – all we only see the men from the neck down, making us feel small and vulnerable, pulling us into her perspective. She’s a tiny heroine ... but she’s also just another kid, nervous about her first day at school. Somehow Rockwell evokes the big picture of America’s fraying social fabric and still presents the tiny exact specific reality of one moment in a little girl’s life, simultaneously.

Well, I promised myself I’d keep this talk of pictures to a thousand words and I’m about to go over my limit. That’s OK, though.

The pictures speak for themselves.

Misunderstood American Masters #1: Billy Joel

2010-05-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

Americans like categories. We like naming and judging and filing away our public figures: Jimmy Carter was a wimp, James Brown was “The hardest working man in show business”, Thomas Edison was a kindly old tinkerer.

That Jimmy Carter was a tough, shrewd politician with a far-sighted agenda we’re only now catching up to; that James Brown spent as much time drinking as he did singing; that Edison with a ruthless businessman who tried to crush all his rivals (including Nicola Tessla, who championed at AC current in universal use today) … we forget about all that. We don’t want to hear it. We prefer the snap shot.

This type of thinking has caused a gradual distortion in the way we view of some of the most beloved artists of the last century. I’m thinking in particular of Billy Joel, Norman Rockwell and Thornton Wilder. They seem like a bizarrely diverse group but they share a common stigma of misapprehension, and they all deserve better.

Starting at the bottom of the list, we have Billy Joel, silent since the 1990s – apart from some undistinguished ‘classical’ compositions that have done nothing to burnish his reputation. In fact they continued the corrosion of our esteem, by reiterating his role as a skilful but insignificant mimic … parroting Rachminoff and Chopin now, instead of Smokey Robinson and Paul McCartney. But then, the critics always hated him, even during his heyday – and he hated them right back. He closed his show for years by shouting ‘Fuck you, Ken Tucker,” and the war of words continues to this day, with Tucker and many others. I was irked and saddened to read a recent article in Slate magazine by Ron Rosenbaum titled “The Worst Pop Singer Ever: Why, Exactly is Billy Joel so Bad?” Of course the title takes it for granted that we all agree with Ron – the badness itself is a foregone conclusion: an unfortunate excrescence of the 8os, like the Charlie’s Angels hair styles and the polyester leisure suits. It’s the critical equivalent of asking “When did you stop beating your wife?” To claim you never did such a thing in the first place requires dismantling the question and separating out the implicit assumption from neutral inquisition.

So let’s start: Billy Joel wasn’t bad.

And he wasn’t arrogant either, despite Rosenbaum’s assertions. A song like “Big Shot”, for instance, where he berates a nameless friend for acting like a pompous clown, was actually addressed to himself – a piece of ‘man in the mirror’ chastisement that went right over Rosenbaum’s head.

Billy Joel was always emotional and he could never maintain the distance from his own emotions that night have made him seem cool. He couldn’t dress up and role-play like Bowie; he couldn’t strut like Jagger, or muster David Byrne’s chilly ironic panache. He just laid it all out there and hoped that honesty and a catchy tune would carry the day. Often, they did. Critics called him corny, and he was, at times. But I choose not to judge him by his worst efforts; that’s a cruel standard, and a mendacious one.

Take a song like “This is the Time” from his forgotten 1986 album The Bridge. It starts with this evocative image of a coastal town in winter:

We walked on the beach beside that old hotel
They're tearing it down now
But it's just as well,

And moves on to sharp-edged but poignant warning about time and romance, framed in the setting of erosion and decay:

This is the time to remember
Cause it will not last forever
These are the days
To hold on to
Cause we won't
Although we'll want to.

The sharp edge in that song, like a cold wind off the Atlantic, cut across most of his music, with a tonic realism that denies the notion that the downtown guy was nothing but a soft-centered sentimentalist.

From “You May be Right” (Glass Houses, 1980)

You may be right
I may be crazy
But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for
Turn out the light
Don't try to save me
You may be wrong for all I know
But you may be right

Remember how I found you there
Alone in your electric chair
I told you dirty jokes until you smiled
You were lonely for a man
I said take me as I am
'Cause you might enjoy some madness for awhile.

From “Only the good Die Young” (The Stranger, 1978)

You said your mother told you
All I could give you was a reputation
Ah she never cared for me
But did she ever say a prayer for me?

Come out, come out, come out Virginia
Don't let me wait
You Catholic girls start much too late
Sooner or later it comes down to fate
I might as well, will be the one
You know that only the good die young

There are many other examples; he’s full of surprises. But beyond the lyrics, Billy Joel has one of the great rock and roll voices – or perhaps I should say, he has three of the great rock and roll voices – a screamer, a crooner and a straight-ahead band-fronting tenor. And he writes the music for all of those styles. The people who try to critique him for the most part know nothing about music theory or composition; most of them can’t even carry a tune. People who know music, like Paul Simon, respect Billy Joel’s achievements as a tunesmith. But don’t take Paul’s word for it – or mine. Ultimately Billy Joel’s reputation will endure because of the music, long after the carping critics and internet scolds have been forgotten.

Paris Hilton's Lost Poem?

2010-05-01T16:38:00.000-07:00

Scholars dispute the provenance of this small masterpiece. But the Paparazzi references seal it for me. Tabloid hacks were stunned by the first publication. But those who know her best just smiled.

For the record, I never went to 29 Palms with her. Ok, maybe once. But we were both too drunk to remember anything about it.

No one understands me
No one cares
No one helps me
Everyone just stares
Except you
Except you
Except you

No one touches me
No one feels
No one reaches out to me
Everyone just steals
Except you
Except you

No one listens to me
No one hears
No one sets my blood on fire
Everyone just leers
Except you

And you are gone
Into your Joshua Tree silence
Your Mojave horizon line glare.
The lawn sprinkler snickers
Wind pushes a beach ball across the empty pool
You are gone but you remain
Like the flare in the eyes
After the flash bulb dies.

Falling in Love with Edna St. Vincent Millay

2010-04-10T18:28:00.000-07:00

It’s National Poetry month and St. Vincent’s hospital in Greenwich Village is closing, a suitably gloomy metaphor for the decline of its namesake’s reputation. Edna St. Vincent Millay (her middle name – which she preferred – came from the hospital where she was born) has been sliding in stature for decades. She can’t seem to get any respect these days. Even two biographies, released months apart in 2002, didn’t do much to rehabilitate her status among the cultural elite. The general feeling seems to be, she was kind of a proto-rock star, pretty and flamboyant, with a knack for dramatic reading: a performance artist whose stage presence concealed the trite, outdated sentimentality of her verse. Snobs love to refer to poetry they don’t like as “verse”, or most damningly “light verse”, which is how they dismiss her most prominent apprentice, Dorothy Parker.

Millay’s poems seem old fashioned because they fly in the face of a trend in poetry that has been gaining legitimacy since well before her death in 1950. Like the twelve tone, non-melodic music that was gaining popularity at mid-century, and expressionist painting, poetry has long been moving toward the abstract. The poetry in vogue then, by writers otherwise as diverse as W.S. Merwin, John Ashberry and Wallace Stevens, concerned itself with ideas not feelings. And this fashionable obscurity persists – check any poem published in the New Yorker magazine in the last twenty years. The new flamboyance is that of superior intellect and erudition. Maybe it began with Ezra Pound, bragging in some poem that only three people in the world could understand it, and you weren’t one of them.

Edna wrote about feelings. She had other archaic vices: she often wrote in rhyme, she wrote sonnets and other traditional verse forms. She addressed the subjects of her poems by quaint locutions like “thou” and “thy”. Technically, her work could have been composed in the nineteenth century. She would have been perfectly at home drinking tea in some salon with Thomas Hardy and Matthew Arnold. She was no innovator, but innovation, at least when performed for its own sake, like an elaborate magic trick (See: the syntax disappears; watch as I pull the Latin quotation from my hat), is often overrated, particularly by academics who can’t do anything else.

Edna St Vincent Millay did something very special: she wrote about her own feelings with a pellucid clarity that helped you understand your own. This puts her in rare and extraordinary company, among the likes of Cummings and Yeats and Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost and T.S Eliot … as well as singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Edna’s true modern avatar.

Her complete poems can be found in a single volume; I found that volume in my junior year at college, on a friend’s dorm-room desk. I picked it up glanced at the table of contents and wound up reading it straight through it, as if it were a novel – or an auto-biography – in verse. I was struck and am still sustained by the unsentimental rigor of her poems. A great friend of mine died this week, and nothing could have expressed my feelings better than Millay’s unbowed, sorrowful “Dirge without Music”:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the
love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not
approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the
world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

And just today, walking out into the early spring sunshine, I thought of Millay’s hard won bitter dismissal of the fine weather:

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

And who could fail to be moved by the clear-eyed honesty of this quatrain, this fine distinction, from one of her late sonnets:

If I had loved you less or played you slyly,

I could have held you for a summer more,

But at the cost of words I value highly;

And no such summer as the one before.

There is an unadorned, plain-spoken truth to these words – it’s almost prosaic at times, despite the careful rhyme-schemes and impeccable scansion. Yet both poetry and beauty reside in the reality she faces up to so bravely, and presents with such humble, merciless precision.

I guess this is a type of greatness we don’t cherish so much any more: the tribute of a big heart and a generous spirit, speaking for us when our own words fail. But it means a lot to me. I suspect I would have fallen in love with Edna St. Vincent Millay if I had been lucky enough to meet her. I’m half in love with her, anyway, sixty years too late. And at this moment in time, at this turn in our American story, when the text message and the e-card, the twitter tweet and the sound bite divide and conquer our ever-decreasing capacity for attention; when ironic distance is the currency of cool, there couldn’t be a better time or a better month, to make Vincent’s acquaintance.

Trust me: it’s going to be love at first sight.

The New Drug Ads: Don't Ask Your Doctor About Dethamil

2010-04-01T15:28:00.001-07:00

Within five minutes this morning I saw an ad for what I’ll call Pharmalax (“Ask your doctor if Pharmalax is right for you.”) and a legal notification that people who had the misfortune to use last years’s Pharamalax, Dethamil, could join a class action suit against the manufacturer if they were experiencing involuntary motion, facial twitches, running sores, hysterical blindness or ‘suicidal thoughts or actions’ Personally I doubt whether the people who experience ‘suicidal actions’ (previously known as “suicide”) will be signing up for the law suit, but everyone else should.

It certainly puts the Pharmalax ad in perspective. A smiling woman cavorts with her children because some symptom she wasn’t even aware of has been ‘managed’ and masked. She hugs her husband while the dog licks her hand the speedy voice dude in the background tells us “possible side effects may include migraine headache, loss of memory, muscle cramps, dyskinesia, crippling nausea, uncontrollable rage, narcolepsy and multiple personality disorder." The good news is your new personalities will be able to sue separately under the terms of the Pharmalax class action suit.

My question is – what the hell is going on? All I see on television are these drug ads for diseases I never knew existed. Apparently my doctor doesn’t know about them either since it’s now my job to inform him about them and consult on my medications. I prefer my doctor to tell me what medications I need. I assume he has better sources of information than whatever random ad he saw on television the night before. Are we really that sick? Do we really have that many new ailments? Or do the pharmaceutical companies just want us to feel that way? I take no drugs myself, except caffeine (my doctor says it’s right for me). It’s possible side effect include writing jittery screeds about the crazy stuff I see on television. I can live with that.

My Dad used to say that he went to his lawyer for medical advice (all those stress related illnesses they shared); and to his doctor for legal advice (all those malpractice suits had taught the old medic well).

Maybe the pharmaceutical companies should take a note from Dad. I’m waiting for the next ad, for Toxifil, the next miracle drug:

“Ask your lawyer if Toxifil is right for you.”

I mean, seriously – there’s no point in destroying your health with some new wonder drug if there’s not going to be a decent pay-out at the end.

American Idol: Bowersox Wins

2010-03-11T14:18:00.000-08:00

Cancel the season, the contest is over.

Give the prize to Crystal Bowersox and let us go back to our Netflix queues. Her performances on American Idol are so much better than everyone else’s, it’s like Shawn White at the Olympics – amazing and bizarre and finally exhilarating. You sit up the first time you hear her and think “Oh yeah – this is a talent contest!” Someone with actual talent is so rare you almost don’t recognize it. She has a gorgeous voice, she can really play guitar and her innate musicality makes the karaoke singers around her look puny and forlorn. She sings Fogerty better than Fogerty; she sings Tracy Chapman and it sounds like she wrote the song herself. Apparently she writes her own songs. I hope she gets to sing one.

Early in the season, Simon disparagingly called her a ‘busker’ – he should pay attention to those buskers, strumming outside the tube stations. A lot of them are good, some of them are great and apparently one of them was Crystal Bowersox.

During season 7, Carrie Underwood was so far ahead of everyone else in the voting that the producers were terrified that the numbers would leak and the suspense would fizzle. I suspect the same thing may happen this year, but I’m not sure. Bowersox is too odd – a little over weight, messy, with a missing tooth. And yet she’s beautiful in a strange way and mysterious, she doesn’t preen for the camera or play to it. She accepts the judge’s praise quietly. She keeps her thoughts to herself. Her attitude of calm self-certainty might alienate the fourteen-year-old girls in Boise and Dubuque, but I like it. She doesn’t really seem a part of the show: she’s from a different, tougher world. David Cook had something like this distance two years ago, but he was a humble fellow, in his talent and his personality – he tried out by accident, after tagging along with his brother, and never seemed convinced by his own success. He was charmingly small. Bowersox is big – a commanding presence, Janis Joplin with a guitar and by now her career is assured no matter what happens in the next month or two.

I’ve already downloaded two songs, which I’ve never done before. I may even cross over to the dark side this season and vote.

I just have to learn how to text first.