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.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Saturday, August 07, 2010
The Paint Whisperer: Disaster and Rescue
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.
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.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Atlas Shrugged: The Movie?
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.
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
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Why TV is Better Than the Movies
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.
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
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.
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.
Thursday, June 03, 2010
American Idol: Some Questions About the Finale
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?
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
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!
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!
Saturday, May 01, 2010
Misunderstood American Masters #3: Thornton Wilder
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.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Falling in Love with Edna St. Vincent Millay
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.
Thursday, April 01, 2010
The New Drug Ads: Don't Ask Your Doctor About Dethamil
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.
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.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
American Idol: Bowersox Wins
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.
"Juliet, Naked": Three Writing Lessons From Nick Hornby
I received Juliet, Naked as a Valentine’s Day present, and it turned out to be a perfect one. This is the old Nick Hornby, writing about the things he loves as much as I do: music and relationships and life in small sea-side towns. Writing a book myself, I devised a brief curriculum in creative writing from the sheer delight that reading this novel gave me.
First: Do the work necessary to make your writing seem effortless.
This means avoiding clichés and finding fresh ways to tell your story. Take this random paragraph for instance:
Duncan had fallen asleep quickly, but she had lain awake, listening to him snoring and not liking him. Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she’d spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she’d ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping? A partner was supposed to be some mark of success: anyone who shared a bed with someone on a nightly basis had proved herself capable in some way, no? Of something? But her relationship now seemed to her to betoken failure, not success. She and Duncan had ended up together because they were the last two people to be picked for a sports team, and she felt she was better at sports than that.
Duncan is obsessed with reclusive rocker Tucker Crowe, whose 20-year silence has just been broken with an album of demo versions of the songs on his classic heartbreak record Juliet. Duncan loves the unadorned ‘naked’ songs, and writes a paean to them on his Tucker Crowe website. Annie disagrees and writes a sharp little essay laying out the reasons, which boil down to -- finished songs are better than half-baked early versions, and these early stumbling efforts are really none of anyone’s business. Duncan is furious. But Tucker Crowe (who keeps up with his scattered internet fan base) loves it, and e-mails her to tell her so. Thus begins a courtship by mail and eventually a full-blown romance.
Here’s another grace note, with Annie thinking about Tucker, invoking jigsaw puzzles without ever mentioning them:
She told herself not to ask too many questions, even though there was so much she wanted to know about him. She liked to think she was curious about people, but her hunger for information went beyond curiosity: she wanted to piece the entirety of his adult life together, and she seemed to be lacking even the straight edges that would get her started.
That brings me to the next lesson:
Give your readers what they want. But still surprise them,
The premise of any book implies certain events and complications, certain moments we can’t help anticipating. In this book, we want Annie and Tucker to meet, we want them to fall in love, we want Tucker to sort out his complicated family (Five children by three wives). We want his son Jackson to like Annie and her dinky little sea-side village. We want Duncan to realize that his ex-girlfriend is entertaining the object of his decades-long monomania … in her small-town kitchen. We want Tucker and his greatest fan to meet. We want Tucker to take Annie away from the damp boredom of her provincial life and we want her to inspire new music from her aging paramour.
Spoilers ahead: it all happens.
But not quite as you expect, which brings me to the third lesson:
Be kind to your characters. Let them shine.
Even Duncan. Duncan could have been the book’s comic relief, the obsessive stalking admirer, who’d break into the house of the woman who inspired his idol’s greatest music, just to snoop in the closets; the fanboy who takes any disagreement about cultural trivia as a romantic deal-breaker. When he finally meets Tucker Crowe you fully expect him to make a fool out of himself. And he does – up to a point. He knows too much trivia, most of it false. He insists on Tucker showing him a passport to prove his identity, and he's as officious as a customs agent as he inspects the picture ID. But there’s more to Duncan than abstract, gossip-grinding adoration. There’s a kind of tough-minded purity to his admiration. Listen:
“All I can say in my defense is that … well, you asked us to listen. And some of us listened a little too hard. This will probably sound silly and not what you want to hear. But I’m not the only person who thinks you’re a genius. And while you might think we’re … we’re inadequate as people, we’re not necessarily the worst judges in the world. We read and watch movies and think, and … I probably blew it as far as you’re concerned with my silly Naked review, which was written at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. But the original album … Do you even know how dense that was? I still haven’t peeled it all away, I don’t think, after all this time. I don’t pretend to understand what those songs meant to you, but it’s the forms of expression you chose, the allusions, the musical references. That’s what makes it art. To my mind. And … sorry, sorry, one last thing. I don’t think people with talent necessarily value it, because it all comes so easy to them., and we never value things that come easy to us. But I value what you did on that album more highly, I think, than anything else I’ve heard. So thank you. And now I think I should leave. But I couldn’t meet you without telling you all that
And you can’t help thinking – "All right! Go, Duncan." We all have someone, some artist, we want to make this speech to. I actually said something like it to John Fowles, after searching him out in Lyme Regis during the summer of 1972. Duncan rose to the occasion much better than I did, and Hornby uses the moment to engage us with Duncan, and make us respect him and even love him a little, just as Annie does. The speech affects Tucker also:
It had never occurred to him that his work was redeemable, or that he was redeemable through his work. But as he listened that afternoon to an articulate, nerdy man tell him over and over again why he was a genius, he could feel himself hoping that it might actually be true.
So Hornby teaches by example: he lets his characters shine, gives us what we want but still surprises us, in a meticulously crafted but apparently effortless novel that keeps us giddy with the pleasures of literature from the first page to the last. Now all I have to do is apply those lessons to my own book. A daunting task. Maybe I’ll re-read Juliet, Naked again, first.
And take better notes this time.
First: Do the work necessary to make your writing seem effortless.
This means avoiding clichés and finding fresh ways to tell your story. Take this random paragraph for instance:
Duncan had fallen asleep quickly, but she had lain awake, listening to him snoring and not liking him. Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she’d spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she’d ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping? A partner was supposed to be some mark of success: anyone who shared a bed with someone on a nightly basis had proved herself capable in some way, no? Of something? But her relationship now seemed to her to betoken failure, not success. She and Duncan had ended up together because they were the last two people to be picked for a sports team, and she felt she was better at sports than that.
Duncan is obsessed with reclusive rocker Tucker Crowe, whose 20-year silence has just been broken with an album of demo versions of the songs on his classic heartbreak record Juliet. Duncan loves the unadorned ‘naked’ songs, and writes a paean to them on his Tucker Crowe website. Annie disagrees and writes a sharp little essay laying out the reasons, which boil down to -- finished songs are better than half-baked early versions, and these early stumbling efforts are really none of anyone’s business. Duncan is furious. But Tucker Crowe (who keeps up with his scattered internet fan base) loves it, and e-mails her to tell her so. Thus begins a courtship by mail and eventually a full-blown romance.
Here’s another grace note, with Annie thinking about Tucker, invoking jigsaw puzzles without ever mentioning them:
She told herself not to ask too many questions, even though there was so much she wanted to know about him. She liked to think she was curious about people, but her hunger for information went beyond curiosity: she wanted to piece the entirety of his adult life together, and she seemed to be lacking even the straight edges that would get her started.
That brings me to the next lesson:
Give your readers what they want. But still surprise them,
The premise of any book implies certain events and complications, certain moments we can’t help anticipating. In this book, we want Annie and Tucker to meet, we want them to fall in love, we want Tucker to sort out his complicated family (Five children by three wives). We want his son Jackson to like Annie and her dinky little sea-side village. We want Duncan to realize that his ex-girlfriend is entertaining the object of his decades-long monomania … in her small-town kitchen. We want Tucker and his greatest fan to meet. We want Tucker to take Annie away from the damp boredom of her provincial life and we want her to inspire new music from her aging paramour.
Spoilers ahead: it all happens.
But not quite as you expect, which brings me to the third lesson:
Be kind to your characters. Let them shine.
Even Duncan. Duncan could have been the book’s comic relief, the obsessive stalking admirer, who’d break into the house of the woman who inspired his idol’s greatest music, just to snoop in the closets; the fanboy who takes any disagreement about cultural trivia as a romantic deal-breaker. When he finally meets Tucker Crowe you fully expect him to make a fool out of himself. And he does – up to a point. He knows too much trivia, most of it false. He insists on Tucker showing him a passport to prove his identity, and he's as officious as a customs agent as he inspects the picture ID. But there’s more to Duncan than abstract, gossip-grinding adoration. There’s a kind of tough-minded purity to his admiration. Listen:
“All I can say in my defense is that … well, you asked us to listen. And some of us listened a little too hard. This will probably sound silly and not what you want to hear. But I’m not the only person who thinks you’re a genius. And while you might think we’re … we’re inadequate as people, we’re not necessarily the worst judges in the world. We read and watch movies and think, and … I probably blew it as far as you’re concerned with my silly Naked review, which was written at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. But the original album … Do you even know how dense that was? I still haven’t peeled it all away, I don’t think, after all this time. I don’t pretend to understand what those songs meant to you, but it’s the forms of expression you chose, the allusions, the musical references. That’s what makes it art. To my mind. And … sorry, sorry, one last thing. I don’t think people with talent necessarily value it, because it all comes so easy to them., and we never value things that come easy to us. But I value what you did on that album more highly, I think, than anything else I’ve heard. So thank you. And now I think I should leave. But I couldn’t meet you without telling you all that
And you can’t help thinking – "All right! Go, Duncan." We all have someone, some artist, we want to make this speech to. I actually said something like it to John Fowles, after searching him out in Lyme Regis during the summer of 1972. Duncan rose to the occasion much better than I did, and Hornby uses the moment to engage us with Duncan, and make us respect him and even love him a little, just as Annie does. The speech affects Tucker also:
It had never occurred to him that his work was redeemable, or that he was redeemable through his work. But as he listened that afternoon to an articulate, nerdy man tell him over and over again why he was a genius, he could feel himself hoping that it might actually be true.
So Hornby teaches by example: he lets his characters shine, gives us what we want but still surprises us, in a meticulously crafted but apparently effortless novel that keeps us giddy with the pleasures of literature from the first page to the last. Now all I have to do is apply those lessons to my own book. A daunting task. Maybe I’ll re-read Juliet, Naked again, first.
And take better notes this time.
Play it Forward: Keeping the Music Alive
I ran into a man, while walking my pug yesterday, and he told me a peculiarly sad story. He had just taken his twenty-year old son to a Buddy Holly tribute band concert. The kid had to be dragged to the event, but wound up loving the music (it’s Buddy Holly – who wouldn’t?). The sad part? It occurred to me even as he was speaking, and in my usual manner, I just blurted it out. “You blew it, man,” I said. “How did your kid get to be twenty without ever hearing Buddy Holly? You’re a parent -- passing that music along is your job.”
I guess I sounded a little harsh, but it was true and the other side of the story – he spent a few minutes describing his futile efforts to enjoy a Kings of Leon album his son wanted him to hear – was just as demoralizing. He owed it to himself and his son to try a little harder. Apart from anything else, Kings of Leon rock. The point is, music stays alive through the proselytizing and cajoling, the commerce and community of families. Things vanish if they’re not appreciated. I think of the ruins in that Borges story which only existed because of one bird visiting on its yearly migrations, because one consciousness valued it. When that bird died, the crumbling old structure simply disappeared. But it’s not just fanciful Argentine metaphors I’m talking about – pieces of history can vanish as well. A Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles had been run by generations of women, with the recipes handed down from mother to daughter, but never transcribed. The system worked perfectly well until the first all-male generation. No one thought to teach the little boys the recipes and when the last old lady who knew them died, a whole subspecies of Mexican cuisine died with her. That’s a cautionary tale about unexamined sexism of course, but it’s also a warning about the fragility of the culture that sustains us.
My mother’s father was a prominent theatrical press agent, a Damon Runyan-esque character who did publicity for the likes of Hoagy Carmichael and Fats Waller, and he exposed her to the great Broadway talent of the twenties and thirties; she married a playwright and continued her intimacy with the stage (Guys and Dolls was playing across the street from my Dad’s first produced play all through the fall of 1952). I grew up saturated with the show tunes she loved, and learned to love the composers who wrote those tunes – George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, among others. They took their place with Beethoven and Tchaikovsky in our household (“Tchaikovsky wrote hit tunes,” she used to exult) Mom could be making breakfast singing “Adelaide’s Lament” from Frank Loesser’s masterpiece (“We get on the train to Niagra, you can hear church bells chime; the compartment is air-conditioned and the mood’s sublime – then we get off at Saratoga, for the fourteenth time), or some ditty from a Mozart opera -- anything was possible. We always had Milton Cross hosting the quiz during the intermission of the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon broadcasts; and I went to sleep every night with the second movement of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik introducing the late night show on WQXR.
I passed all this on to my kids – along with the music I grew up with … the Beatles, The Stones, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Cat Stevens, The Who, Neil Young, Elton John. My kids were the first ones in their elementary school to discover the Beatles, and I was happy so see a small island version of Beatle-mania spread through the ten-year-old Nantucket community faster than a flu bug, They moved on -- to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, The Clash, Nirvana and beyond. Now I’m reaping the benefits, as I discover groups as diverse as The Postal Service The Shins, The Killers, Belle and Sebastian, Vampire Weekend, The Mountain Goats … and yes, Kings of Leon.
How would I have ever discovered this music, without my children? And how would they have discovered it themselves, if they hadn’t grown up in the music-rich environment my wife and I provided? They have taste, and we’re at least partly responsible. It all comes around in giant elegant circles. When my Mom was in the hospital this summer she wanted to hear some ‘new music’- she wanted to know what my kids were listening to. I played her John Darnielle’s Cotton and her face lit up, just as mine had the first time Nick played it for me, three generations connected by the harsh, elegiac spell of a beautiful song.
I can’t wait to hear the music my grandchildren will bring to me, in exchange for “You’re the Top”, “The Pretender” and “Cotton.” It’s how we keep the music alive. But it’s more than that. It’s how we keep each other alive, too.
That’s what I wanted to tell the old man I met on my dog walk. Maybe I’ll make him a mix-tape. He’s going to love Kings of Leon, if he just gives them a chance.
A New Low for American Idol
I know that's an ambiguous headline. I could be talking about the hightened tapioca inanity of the judges' comments last night (Simon excepted), which kind of boil down to "You were bad but you could be good and you're cute but you chose the wrong song and you deserve to be here but you don't, because if we admitted how bad you really were we'd have to admit we blew it. I mean -- we picked you out of hundreds of thousand of singers. And an epic fail like that doesn't exactly boost ratings."
I could also be talking about last night's guys, who with one exception were flat, boring, soulless and out of tune. It would make sense, since I can't remember a more dismal group.
But that's not what I'm talking about and neither are the grating re-cycled "this is my dream" sound-bites that precede every clunking performance. Pick a better dream dude.
Or better yet -- wake up.
No, I'm talking about one performance in particular, and the judges' response to it. The culprit is John Park, a nice looking but talentless young man who chose to perform one of the greatest works of art of the 20th century (and I mean all the arts -- stack it in there with Christo's wrapped cathedral and Guernica and Death of a Salesman; with Falling Water and Top Hat and The Great Gatsby) I'm talking about Billy Holiday's searing anthem to self-reliance, "God Bless the Child".
There was so much wrong with that segment, it's hard to know where to start. The kid had no business even trying to scale that mountain. He sang it with no heart, no feeling, no sense tht he'd ever had to take the left-overs from a rich relative's table -- and, like so many of the other boys -- with no rhythm and no tune. The song was barely recognizable ... that may have been the best thing about John Park's performance.
But it got worse. None of the judge's mentioned Billie Holiday. I found this particularly offensive since one of the standard critical tropes since the beginning of American Idol has been for the panel to say stuff like "That's a Mariah Carey song. You got to bring it when you try a song that big. That's a lot to live up to, dog" and "All I could hear was Celine Dion, honey. She owns that song" or "That sounded like a karoake version of Whitney Houston. You brought nothing of your own to it."(For extra points, guess the judges)
But when it's a Billie Holiday song, the greatest singer in Jazz history, who makes Whitney Houston (Or Diana Ross who attempted to play her in the execrable biopic) sound like big-throated school girls taking a solo at the chorus concert, no one says a word. Maybe Billie Holiday doesn't register with those people, maybe they don't care.
But I do, and this was the moment where American Idol jumped the shark for me. I don't think I'll be watching it any more. Instead, I think I'll take out my 1937 Count Basie recordings and check out Lester Young making some real music with Lady Day.
That's a lot to live up to, dog.
I could also be talking about last night's guys, who with one exception were flat, boring, soulless and out of tune. It would make sense, since I can't remember a more dismal group.
But that's not what I'm talking about and neither are the grating re-cycled "this is my dream" sound-bites that precede every clunking performance. Pick a better dream dude.
Or better yet -- wake up.
No, I'm talking about one performance in particular, and the judges' response to it. The culprit is John Park, a nice looking but talentless young man who chose to perform one of the greatest works of art of the 20th century (and I mean all the arts -- stack it in there with Christo's wrapped cathedral and Guernica and Death of a Salesman; with Falling Water and Top Hat and The Great Gatsby) I'm talking about Billy Holiday's searing anthem to self-reliance, "God Bless the Child".
There was so much wrong with that segment, it's hard to know where to start. The kid had no business even trying to scale that mountain. He sang it with no heart, no feeling, no sense tht he'd ever had to take the left-overs from a rich relative's table -- and, like so many of the other boys -- with no rhythm and no tune. The song was barely recognizable ... that may have been the best thing about John Park's performance.
But it got worse. None of the judge's mentioned Billie Holiday. I found this particularly offensive since one of the standard critical tropes since the beginning of American Idol has been for the panel to say stuff like "That's a Mariah Carey song. You got to bring it when you try a song that big. That's a lot to live up to, dog" and "All I could hear was Celine Dion, honey. She owns that song" or "That sounded like a karoake version of Whitney Houston. You brought nothing of your own to it."(For extra points, guess the judges)
But when it's a Billie Holiday song, the greatest singer in Jazz history, who makes Whitney Houston (Or Diana Ross who attempted to play her in the execrable biopic) sound like big-throated school girls taking a solo at the chorus concert, no one says a word. Maybe Billie Holiday doesn't register with those people, maybe they don't care.
But I do, and this was the moment where American Idol jumped the shark for me. I don't think I'll be watching it any more. Instead, I think I'll take out my 1937 Count Basie recordings and check out Lester Young making some real music with Lady Day.
That's a lot to live up to, dog.
Killer Whale: "I've Had It."
an 'animal expert' on one of the network morning shows expressing bafflement at the tragic Killer Whale incident at Sea World yesterday. They really can't figure it out? Is that possible? Can they really be so dense and solipsistic?
I remember a story about the great dolphin researcher John Lilly -- he set his study animals free because they were mocking the tests he gave them and it became clear to him that they were just as smart as he was. Ultimately he couldn't justify holding intelligent animals captive.
Sea World has no such scruples.
The spokespeople talk about the 'love' between the whales and the trainers, the 'joy' and 'play'. But if the tanks were connected with the open water and the whales could come and go as they pleased, I know and you know and the corporate shills at Sea World know just as well as we do, that those whales would be gone in one flick of a tail, never to be seen again.
They're prisoners. They live in cages, forced to perform grotesque antics for our amusement. There were about a dozen Twilight Zone episodes where humans wound up in alien zoos -- a chilling thought. If puny venal arrogant creatures abducted you from your world and stuck you in a 'familiar environment' (Complete with cable TV and frozen dinners, while making you dance and juggle, feeding you chunks of meat when you cooperated, you might get a little pissed off, yourself. The thought of some opportune pay-back might cross your mind. After all, what would you have to lose?
This isn't the first time a whale has attacked. It won't be the last. Sea World's whale show is closed down for the moment, and they should keep it that way. They claim to love the whales. If so they should follow the advice of everyone from Richard Bach to Sting:
If you love them, set them free.
I remember a story about the great dolphin researcher John Lilly -- he set his study animals free because they were mocking the tests he gave them and it became clear to him that they were just as smart as he was. Ultimately he couldn't justify holding intelligent animals captive.
Sea World has no such scruples.
The spokespeople talk about the 'love' between the whales and the trainers, the 'joy' and 'play'. But if the tanks were connected with the open water and the whales could come and go as they pleased, I know and you know and the corporate shills at Sea World know just as well as we do, that those whales would be gone in one flick of a tail, never to be seen again.
They're prisoners. They live in cages, forced to perform grotesque antics for our amusement. There were about a dozen Twilight Zone episodes where humans wound up in alien zoos -- a chilling thought. If puny venal arrogant creatures abducted you from your world and stuck you in a 'familiar environment' (Complete with cable TV and frozen dinners, while making you dance and juggle, feeding you chunks of meat when you cooperated, you might get a little pissed off, yourself. The thought of some opportune pay-back might cross your mind. After all, what would you have to lose?
This isn't the first time a whale has attacked. It won't be the last. Sea World's whale show is closed down for the moment, and they should keep it that way. They claim to love the whales. If so they should follow the advice of everyone from Richard Bach to Sting:
If you love them, set them free.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Democratic Conspiracies Revealed
Yes, now it can be told!
Those bumbling contentious disorganized democrats are in fact Machiavellian geniuses, hatching plot after plot designed to bring down the Republican party, assure Democratic victory in 2010 and guarantee President Obama a second term in 2012.
Who are the masterminds behind these intricate, devious schemes? Rahm Emmanuel? Eric Holder? Joe Biden? Barack Obama himself? Michelle? Perhaps they’re all part of the secret cabal currently scheming the downfall of the GOP. We know this much – no one could have conjured these strategies alone. This magnitude of cunning requires a virtual Manhattan Project of political hatchet men and tacticians.
Starting with the simplest of the three plans we know about, the Obama administration may have planted a mole in the inner circles of Dick Cheney’s private life. Somehow, they have convinced him to go on the air, to speak at CPAC conventions, to write articles, to make himself as conspicuous as possible speaking the idiotic partisan rhetoric which -- this is the master stroke – he actually believes himself, gradually corroding any credibility his administration might have possessed and turning thousands if not millions of undecided voters to the Progressive cause in what can only be called a fugue state of contempt and disgust.
Electing Scott Brown was a far trickier proposition – yet crucial, in order to shake up the party and push health Care legislation toward Reconciliation vote in the Senate. Only a ‘catastrophe’ of this magnitude could goad the Democratic majority into such a bold response. But that meant choosing the democratic candidate most likely to lose the election and once the cabal did the due diligence on Martha Coakley, they saw the opportunity. Here was a woman who scorned shaking hands with the electorate, who took her election as a foregone conclusion and who added the special gift of zero charisma to the mix of snobbery, entitlement and standard “democratic” muddle-headed foolishness. It seemed like a long shot – this was Kennedy’s seat after all – but they knew they had picked a horse who could lose big-time and there’s a rumor going around the West Wing that Kennedy himself had endorsed this last ditch end run around the Republican filibuster.
I save the most brilliant design for the last.
The problem was a basic one: how to split the Republican Party, as Perot did in 1992 – and as Nader had split the Democrats in 2000. There’s no more certain route to victory, and the best part is you can mask your power-grab in a swath of approved rhetoric about the value of third party candidates, inclusive democracy and the voice of the people. Someone in the White house must have been watching Glenn Beck, and that’s where the inspiration came from: foment a whole super-conservative ‘anti-tax’ ‘grass roots’ movement. The fuse was there – it just needed the right undercover Democratic operatives to light it. Which Democratic Karl Rove came up with term “tea bagger’ we may never know, but it was a flash of genius. Now Republican candidates have the Hobson’s choice of appeasing the Tea bag movement and alienating their base, or spurning them and looking like liberals in disguise. When a tea-bag candidate in the 2012 election finally appears (Palin is on the short list, we know that), the Republican vote will be fragmented, torn apart by its own partisan fault lines, arguing about tax relief and abortion while a true Democratic majority with a victorious Democratic president in the White House steers the country back onto a course of compassion, fairness and sanity.
Brilliant!
Well, of course this whole idea is absurd. The Democrats coluldn't organize a pie fight in a bakery. They’re the Bay of Pigs People, the Iran rescue mission people the "Oops-I-left-a-stain-on-the-dress"people. They couldn’t plan a surprise party for an Alzheimer’s victim.
But a boy can always dream.
Those bumbling contentious disorganized democrats are in fact Machiavellian geniuses, hatching plot after plot designed to bring down the Republican party, assure Democratic victory in 2010 and guarantee President Obama a second term in 2012.
Who are the masterminds behind these intricate, devious schemes? Rahm Emmanuel? Eric Holder? Joe Biden? Barack Obama himself? Michelle? Perhaps they’re all part of the secret cabal currently scheming the downfall of the GOP. We know this much – no one could have conjured these strategies alone. This magnitude of cunning requires a virtual Manhattan Project of political hatchet men and tacticians.
Starting with the simplest of the three plans we know about, the Obama administration may have planted a mole in the inner circles of Dick Cheney’s private life. Somehow, they have convinced him to go on the air, to speak at CPAC conventions, to write articles, to make himself as conspicuous as possible speaking the idiotic partisan rhetoric which -- this is the master stroke – he actually believes himself, gradually corroding any credibility his administration might have possessed and turning thousands if not millions of undecided voters to the Progressive cause in what can only be called a fugue state of contempt and disgust.
Electing Scott Brown was a far trickier proposition – yet crucial, in order to shake up the party and push health Care legislation toward Reconciliation vote in the Senate. Only a ‘catastrophe’ of this magnitude could goad the Democratic majority into such a bold response. But that meant choosing the democratic candidate most likely to lose the election and once the cabal did the due diligence on Martha Coakley, they saw the opportunity. Here was a woman who scorned shaking hands with the electorate, who took her election as a foregone conclusion and who added the special gift of zero charisma to the mix of snobbery, entitlement and standard “democratic” muddle-headed foolishness. It seemed like a long shot – this was Kennedy’s seat after all – but they knew they had picked a horse who could lose big-time and there’s a rumor going around the West Wing that Kennedy himself had endorsed this last ditch end run around the Republican filibuster.
I save the most brilliant design for the last.
The problem was a basic one: how to split the Republican Party, as Perot did in 1992 – and as Nader had split the Democrats in 2000. There’s no more certain route to victory, and the best part is you can mask your power-grab in a swath of approved rhetoric about the value of third party candidates, inclusive democracy and the voice of the people. Someone in the White house must have been watching Glenn Beck, and that’s where the inspiration came from: foment a whole super-conservative ‘anti-tax’ ‘grass roots’ movement. The fuse was there – it just needed the right undercover Democratic operatives to light it. Which Democratic Karl Rove came up with term “tea bagger’ we may never know, but it was a flash of genius. Now Republican candidates have the Hobson’s choice of appeasing the Tea bag movement and alienating their base, or spurning them and looking like liberals in disguise. When a tea-bag candidate in the 2012 election finally appears (Palin is on the short list, we know that), the Republican vote will be fragmented, torn apart by its own partisan fault lines, arguing about tax relief and abortion while a true Democratic majority with a victorious Democratic president in the White House steers the country back onto a course of compassion, fairness and sanity.
Brilliant!
Well, of course this whole idea is absurd. The Democrats coluldn't organize a pie fight in a bakery. They’re the Bay of Pigs People, the Iran rescue mission people the "Oops-I-left-a-stain-on-the-dress"people. They couldn’t plan a surprise party for an Alzheimer’s victim.
But a boy can always dream.
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