Kaiser's Culture

The Wright Stuff: Clinton '08

2008-03-22T14:09:00.018-04:00

Make no mistake: there is still a clear road ahead for Hillary Clinton to take the Democratic Party's nomination. In fact, there is only one identical road for either Senator Clinton or Sen. Obama-- the superdelegates. Have a problem with this arguably "undemocratic" aspect of the nomination process? Well, chart it up with the Electoral College, US Senate apportionment of seats by states, the Supreme Court, the non-seating of the Michigan and Florida delegates, and other violations of the Periclean Age democratic "ideal" we all supposedly aspire to.

But we don't. And the Democrats' bevy of superdelegates, created in the wake of primaries that ended in the nominations of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter-- weak candidates and, in the latter case, a fascinating but ultimately unsuccessful President (who suffered an earlier "Civil War" within the ranks of the Democratic Party in 1980 between himself and Senator Ted Kennedy) are ideally positioned to finally assert themselves in history by fulfilling the function they were dreamed up to do: prevent fickle and misguided voters from anointing an unelectable and unfit contender.

The Jeremiah Wright scandal has revealed Barack Obama's bona fides, both as a character and a phenomenon. Despite the fact that his address on the controversy was roundly (and predictably) praised by mainstream, center-left and hard-left pundits and bloggers, it has revealed deficits of judgment and candor not to be overlooked in a contender for the nation's highest office. Obama still wields his silky oratory and commands high marks from his acolytes, but the rest of the country is still reeling (as poll numbers strongly indicate) with difficult and rather angry questions.

Obama's speech, though seemingly a nuanced and moderate take on America's contemporary race issues, didn't serve to answer the questions that forced him to deliver the speech in the first place. What exactly have been Obama's reactions to his long-time pastor and spiritual mentor's remarks from the pulpit? Does a would-be President and "uniter" flinch at sermons crying out "God damn America?" Does the mixed-race multiculturalist have quibbles with a message of black victimhood and liberation theology out of the pages of Sixties radicalism-- the same sort of kneejerk agitprop which Obama has repeatedly claimed on the campaign trail has a pernicious hold (in his analysis) upon the minds of Newt Gingrich and the Clintons? How does one claim to be a sort of new New Democrat, moving beyond competing radicalism of the Left and Right, while attending a church so ostentatiously committed to a gospel of Black Power? And what about Rev. Wright's brazen claims as to questions of fact: that the United States government is responsible for the narcotics trade, or that it invented AIDS as a weapon of genocide against black people?

Perhaps Obama sincerely shrugged off these and other statements as rhetorical excesses, or perhaps he didn't see it as his place to castigate his pastor, the man who led him to Christ. Granted, many other churchgoers across the country might similarly have refrained from approaching their minister. But then, in the man who would lead us, hold Cabinet meetings and conduct negotiations with foreign leaders, surely we can ask for more backbone. I have long been skeptical about Obama's fitness to lead precisely because of his endless boilerplate about 'unity' and 'change', coupled with his alarming suggestions that his foreign policy would lead with apologies and no-conditions-attached summits with noxious dictators. Obama's conduct via-a-vis Wright underlines this point. That he not only held his tongue then, but, his speech notwithstanding, is STILL holding his tongue on these specifics, tells us that Obama is either a calculator or a coward-- in either event, hardly "transformational" and clearly not "leader"--like.

The Rev. Wright's "U.S. of KKK A." and "God damn America" comments might be perfectly allowable protest in a slam poetry event or on a blog. I by no means wish to suggest that these bare words themselves, or others like them, constitute traitorous conduct. But Obama is not running to be Poet Laureate or Activist-in-Chief, dream jobs where spontaneous effusions can always be chalked up as "moral challenges" (yes, I've indulged a few myself!), and during his Presidential campaign he has rather ostentatiously sought to distance himself from Wright, ever since the infamous invite/non-invite that kicked off the campaign-- in fact, Obama has shunned being the candidate of "protest". Yet his background as a "community activist" (one of these nauseating descriptions, like 'barrista', so tragically beloved of the hip Left) and, as is now glaringly obvious, as a state Senator representing the Chicago South Side, home of campus academics and black liberationists, has left him with a woefully one-sided take on the nation's politics, one rooted deeply in Sixties agitprop and soft-focus utopian attitudinizing. What has he done to demonstrate a grasp of practical politics, aside from grabbing up a score of caucuses in this competition?

Given the similarities in stated positions between Obama and Clinton, it has always been an open question, why one would pick the unseasoned newbie over the veteran infighter? Well, the Democratic faithful (God love 'em) are forever dreaming of the Messiah, and the Messiah cannot appear on Capitol Hill except to be crucified. Do we really want four years of Obama getting mangled before Congress and on the world stage, just to satisfy an emotional itch for some vague 'inspiration'? Are the threats posed by multiple wars and recession really relegatable to the back seat thanks to an "historic opportunity" to affirm the laying-to-rest of the legacy of racism, in large measure a symbolic gesture, perhaps of little real help for the immediate needs of black communities reeling under the pressures of crime, poverty, and failing schools? Would it not be better done to tackle our real-world problems first, elect a leader with demonstrable committments to make life better for impoverished and middle class Americans?-- one who, by-the-by, also embodies the wish for an "historic opportunity"?

Hillary Clinton's experience and competence have been treated with a counterfactual nay-saying difficult to be believed, culminating in one of the most bizarre non sequiturs to ever cross my ears: when pundits were granting us their comments on Hillary's newly-released White House schedules on NBC's "Today Show", one offered this odd verdict on her overseas visits: "Nothing ventured, nothing gained." To which my internal "Terminator" response-selection screen can only blink out the odious text-speak: WFT?!? Has the sexism of the Chirping Class reached such nauseating lows that we must deny the possibility that a First Lady who visited eighty countries and who once had six Cabinet Secretaries answering to her on Healthcare policy never ventured no further into our nation's global affairs than to swap Pillsbury recipes with Cherie Blair? Or can we not even be bothered to recall that Hillary sits on an obscure Senate committee that has to do with Armed Services? No-- for these are mere technicalities compared with the awesome charm of the fact that our multiethnic skywalker once lived on a distant desert planet known as "Indonesia" when he was (oh, can I be forgiven for not memorizing the particulars of the messiah's childhood?) eight or something.

Which brings me abruptly back to the superdelegates. Hillary's route to the nomination is not a jot more "mathematically impossible" than Barack Obama's-- they are both quite entirely dependent upon superdelegates for the nomination! And so we have the endless sophistries about how they should decide their votes-- none in the least binding, or indeed other than completely arbitrary. There is only one basis upon which they are compelled to decide: their own judgment. And they are transparently free to base that judgment upon whatever factors they wish to calculate upon. And it is likewise transparently clear that they were created to be free-- free of the democratic majority, free of the states, free of the "delegate count" going before them. What they SHOULD decide upon are two exclusive factors: first, who would make the best President?; and second, who is more electable?

Obama's political inexperience and naivete are, respectively, so narrow and so expansive, I don't think there can be any question about the first. Hillary Clinton is no saint and, Heaven be thanked, she isn't running as one. Lord knows she's made mistakes-- but she knows it too. Every American has long since had seared into their consciousness how tough, how unembarrassable this woman is. New Hampshire, Super Tuesday, Ohio and Texas-- all the comebacks urge us just how strong she can be. And this personal strength is being matched to demonstrable (and growing) electoral clout. With her current lead in the Pennsylvania polls yawning open to 16% over Obama, she appears set to racket up some very strong wins in the final months of the nominating campaign. Indeed, a majority in the popular primary vote may finally be hers. Yet Obamamaniac pundits still parse every news flash for a 'Hillary withdrawal'-- see the latest with Bill Richardson's endorsement of Obama (and oh, what calculations were going on there?)-- as if a Hillary withdrawal somehow could make even a sliver of sense now. After Texas and Ohio, with momentous winds at her back and the potentially ruinous Wright flap, Hillary would be insane to throw in the towel, and the vast majority of Americans would be left with jaws gaping, mouthing only (what else is new?) "WTF?!?"

Indeed, let us venture now that if Obama still takes the Democratic nomination, he will give the Democrats a perceived Patriotism Gap far in excess of that suffered by the likes of Carter or Kerry (both, like McGovern, with distinguished records of military service, as if that ever helps a Democrat!). Will you blame the Republicans?: what, YOU wouldn't go after a Republican with a minister who cried out "God damn Muslims" or "God damn homosexuals" or-- for whatever reason-- "God damn America"? [and remember: Hagee is not McCain's personal pastor!] George W. Bush was castigated for speaking at Bob Jones University: can Barack Obama not be castigated for his choice of church? Yet Democrats, for the moment, seem to be basking in an idiotic insularity. When Obama wins a state like Wyoming, the cry is "See, he can make us competitive in red states again!!" Good people, take a deep breath and listen to me: It's a Democratic Party caucus. They're going to give it to a DEMOCRAT. Bush carried Wyoming in 2004 with SEVENTY PERCENT of the vote. You are NOT going to carry Wyoming!!!

Hillary's negatives are all long since "known knowns"; Obama's are fresh, raw as a wound. Hippie idealism will not stand for long in the bracing air of reality in any event; and in Obama's case, naysayers don't have to drag out those recruiters with the Che Guevera poster any more. Clinton's direct speech contrasts more and more favorably against Barack's vague wordings and questionable juxtapositions (did his grandmother's fear of black youth-- a streetwise norm, however regretted-- really demand comparison with Wright's public effusions?)-- while her vastly greater experience, however ludicrously underplayed in the media today, offers a rational rebuttal to Obama's claims to office that is well-nigh decisive by itself. That Richardson, a long-time Clinton crony, would throw in his hand to the Obama camp is mystifying, but it hardly troubles Clinton's ever-stronger showing [perhaps it was his only shot at outreaching Holbrook for Secretary of State?]. No matter. It ain't over till the superdelegates sing, and they damn well know they'd better sit still for the fifth act. Hillary's under the spotlight, standing center-stage.

Godspeed, William F. Buckley

2008-02-27T16:28:00.006-05:00

The contemplation of an enduring consciousness is a noble thing. For one mind to continuously survey the scene, week after week, year after year, age upon age, is a state of affairs both rare and admirable. That few would find in William F. Buckley's opinions and observations an unmitigated source of pleasure and agreement goes without saying. But his humour was sharp, his prose fluid, and his arguments, if not always so perfectly logical as he might urge us all to be, were well-considered and worthy of our consideration.

In his long-ago obituary for Ayn Rand, he pressed his hope that her Apollonian intellect might now be experiencing a sort of ravishment (he spoke of Heaven in almost Dionysian tones) such as her rationality might never (by his reckoning) have considered. If I had ever met Buckley, I might have asked him under what auspices in the Christian dispensation he justified the hope that Rand might be admitted to Paradise. Is libertarianism a workable substitute for Grace when caught in a divine pinch? Be that as it may, I salute the graciousness of Buckley's well-wishes to a philosophical adversary and extend to him the same.

It is said that Buckley was found dead at his desk at home; I cannot imagine but that he was either busily at work upon another column or lost in the magnificent strains of Johann Sebastian Bach. I admit to a kind of noble elation, and an envy, as I consider this passing of his, so in character with the man and the life he lived. I haven't picked up a "National Review" since October, but I assume he had continued at his work right to the very end. There are many sad and undeserving fates in this world; but to pass at age 82, in possession of one's faculties and still busy upon one's life-work, and at one's very desk to boot, is as desirable a means to embrace mortal necessity as we might imagine. He has gone to it in brave style. Godspeed, William F. Buckley

"Cannibal" weekend, CBS Monday

2007-09-25T12:41:00.003-04:00

I didn't catch all of the season premiere of "How I Met Your Mother"-- I walked into it pretty late-- but I'll offer a few takes on the CBS Monday night sitcoms, the apparent heir to the mantle of dominance once maintained by NBC's Thursday nights from Cosby through Seinfeld to "Friends". I don't think Robin will be terribly missed, at least not for sentimental reasons. Her presumptive role as the gentle mocking Voice of Reason (a sometimes unreasonable sort of 'reason') may be harder to fill though. Marshall and Lily may be the cutest couple in the world, but they need another couple to achieve comedic balance, and if this season is going to be about building a new central relationship, then it will be a challenge to make it funny.

I'll pass on offering judgment about "The Big Bang Theory", though I quite enjoyed it. Will the taller, geekier one mellow into a loveable sort or is he a misanthropic Squidward? I had pegged him from the trailers as the heartfelt one, but I see now that the shorter one is definitely meant to be genial and endearing. Oh well, I'll adjust accordingly. But is our heroine supposed to be a foxy minx, jolly wench or Everyday Girl? I need clarification.

The less said about "Two and a Half Men", well . . . --Of course I ENJOY the show; who wouldn't be delighted really? Who would have imagined that Charlie babyface Sheen would have evolved into something whose chin is a veritable comic strip come to life? Even without the potty humor, the deadpans would be hysterical. But I have nothing to 'analyze', at least not in my present state, and so--

Man, that Audrey is a bitch! "Rules of Engagement" has generally charmed, thanks to the comedic camaraderie of the males, what with chiselled Jeff as a more affable and affectless version of the male solipsism of Charlie Sheen's "Charlie" and David Spade as a peroxided metrosexual Genie-in-a-Bottle take on "How I Met Your Mother"s Barney, and then--er--that other dude as a less fey variation on Marshall. But "Rules", for all of its comedy-of-recognition in the relationships department (yes, if you're heterosexual, definitely watch it with your partner), presses hotly on the perils of the Whipped Man. From what frame of reference is this show being written, that a wife can blithely insist upon her husband getting surgery for his snoring? Would unpretentious sorts like Audrey and Jeff really consider a surgical procedure for such a trifling complaint [oh, but I don't live in the Real America, DO I?!?! . . . ] Well, I don't think Jeff would consent, nor should he, either as a person or as a believable character. If "Rules of Engagement" is going to submit Jeff to this kind of treatment, they might as well write him into the basement in "Pulp Fiction." And Audrey really needs to mellow, fast-- far from being a character women can relate to (I hope, at any rate, they feel restrained from doing so!), Audrey has always come across as a perpetually irritated scowl whose permanent state of unhappiness is very thinly veiled, and not by charm; that unhappiness, by the way, can hardly be attributed to the alleged thickheadedness of Jeff, whose self-deprecating manner of deadpanning his way through life is borderline Buddhistic, which is why, despite the affectations of masculine stereotype imposed upon the character, I regard Jeff as Marshall's near kin. Too bad he doesn't have himself a Lilly.

In other thoughts: Ruggero Deodato's splatterhouse exploitation 'classic' "Cannibal Holocaust" is neither the decathlon of gore-hounds nor the grindhouse "Straw Dogs" it is often made out to be. Putting aside Deodato's lamentable decision to kill real living animals on screen, the film is an ambitious but failed attempt to make terrifying moralistic hay out of crude Sadean pseudo-anthropology and edgy shifting of perspective. The opening scene, a brilliantly scripted and shot faux-news broadcast brimming with conceited smuggery about the "omnipotence" of man is so good I've watched it again and again. Our story will concern four "brave" young Americans, "children of the Space Age armed"--significant word--"with cameras" who plunged into deepest Amazonia never to be seen again. The first half of the film concerns the effort to retrieve what, it turns out, is all that is left of their intrepid adventure--their cannisters of film; the second "half" rolls that film, with appropriate interruptions, and significantly upends any idealistic or hopeful notions we may have begun this film with.

That the four documentarians turned out to be nihilistic punks comes as no surprise-- their cocky swagger when we first meet them is enough to prove that they will come to a poor end, and probably deserve it in some respect. It is a truism, good enough as far as it goes, that these four got exactly what they deserved. Except I feel that the film fails to give us quite enough-- not grisliness or wrongdoing, for there's plenty of that, but-- explication. The intention of Alan Yates in torching the hut was not, apparently, to kill everyone inside but to film the desperate escape. Of course he was horrifically exploiting and endangering these people-- moveover, it seems evident that at least someone died in this atrocity. Yet when we cut back to the present for the Professor's commentary, it lingers upon the slain pig (how prophetic of "Cannibal Holocaust"s own fate, it's animal atrocities having upstaged its many displays of man's inhumanity to man), and if there was a charred body in the wreckage, it is not commented upon. Of course, even if all the tribesmen made it out alive, the torching of their hut would be enough for us to despise the filmmakers and grimly but eagerly await their terrible comeuppance. But why the dissonance here about the consequences of their act? Has Professor Monroe made a moralizing mental slip, failing to see the charred remains because he is not yet equipped to ask "Who are the real cannibals?" Or has Deodato actually conceptualized his audience's (justifiable) reactions into the film's design, taunting us for our experience of entertainment in watching humans sadistically abused while fretting over the depiction of animals killed (or so he insists) for food?

"Cannibal Holocaust" is full of undigested dissonances of this sort, which unfortunately swell over and drown the less comprehensive displays of knowing dissonance incorporated into the film's design. The earliest scenes of "The Green Inferno" footage we see are persuasive bits of camera testing and tomfoolery. There's the disturbing trick of showing us "The Long Road to Hell", passed off here as 'fake' (or was that simply "staged"?-- a significant difference!) though this documentary footage is (supposedly) real-world atrocity footage from Africa. All of this primes us to be unsettled further by what is to come, but its bearing on subsequent events is a little hard to pin down. Doubtless being warned of Yates' duplicitous ways allows us a sense of outraged discovery when the hut is torched-- we realize just what kind of "documentary" these folks have in mind. Up until this point we have sympathized with the missing documentarians; now we learn to loathe them. But, as the ultimate victims of the titular "Holocaust", is it important for the film's total effect that we should still identify with them?

This, I think, is the larger cognitive game that Deodato loses at. Through swatches of "The Green Inferno" we can wonder at what the filmmakers' precise attitude to events is. Do they exculpate themselves, in their minds, of their behavior because they see the cannibals as subhuman, or simply because there is no civilized court of law to impose any standard of behavior upon them? Were they born sociopathic, or were they desensitived by previous exposure to horrors in Southeast Asia, or by reading Deconstructionists at NYU? It would be nice to get a little something of this sort to chew on [oh, the unintended pun!], but we receive no sense of incipient madness, or even of events pushing people with few moral defenses towards even more despicable behavior. No doubt we readily believe that Yates and crew came prepared to do exactly the terrible things they do in pursuit of their "documentary", but that doesn't explain their subsequent, even more willfully evil conduct. Nor can the film overcome the dissonance between the grave and disturbed faces of the actors during the disemboweling of the turtle (apparently unscripted and genuine displays of torment and disgust) with the nonchalance they put on for the gang-rape scene. If "Cannibal Holocaust" wanted to insinuate growing moral disease within the confusing and chaotic confines of the Green Inferno, even simply by providing thoughtful interstices in the surviving footage, then that would be an achievement. As it is, we feel that we are simply exploited, as viewers, with one nasty scene piled atop another willy-nilly.

It is a kind of agonized triumph in moral insight, by way of indicting media detachment from human misery and its failures of conscience, that "Cannibal Holocaust" places Faye during the gang-rape of the stray cannibal girl as a hectoring mommy, chiding her boys for wasting film! Though some commentators have apparently misread compassion into Faye's reaction, it is clear that she evinces no concern for the girl as a human being or, specifically, as a female victim of rape. Faye's cri de coeur is "We're not making a porno!"-- as if, in fact, the filmed rape of a tribal girl would constitute an exercise in porn as opposed to the "snuff film" genre. But yet Faye has the good sense to recognize that a filmed rape cannot make their final cut, and thus she protests vociferously-- at the waste of precious film!! Of course, once Yates joins in she becomes physically involved in trying to pull him off--either out of jealousy or concern that he might contract some social disease and pass it on to her. I take these motives as implied since, again, it is utterly clear from the rest of her outcries that her motivation is neither concern for the victim nor shock that her lover and pals have descended to this outrage.

Thus "Cannibal Holocaust" is capable of being as grim in its moral outlook as in its strict articulation of all the horrors that can be inflicted upon the human body. But these harsh imaginings of human moral failure, vivid as they are, don't amount to much if the viewer isn't given the tools to try and add up how these people came to be the way they are. Of course where the cannibals are concerned that's a question for anthropology. Not that I take anything in "Cannibal Holocaust" as a testiment to actual cannibal practice, but then cannibalism is not strictly an imaginary phenomenon, any more than snuff films, since the online murders by Al Qaeda and their colleagues have certainly literalized that urban legend. It's unavoidable that the cannibal tribes come off as frightening agents of destruction, nor can it be said that they act simply in defense of their own, since we have the gratuitous barbarities of the "social surgery" sequence, to say nothing of the ritual murder on the hellish riverbank that kicks off the film's roster of sickening slayings. But Deodato is not making "Cannibal Holocaust" to take the moral temperature of the Amazonians. It's uncomfortable to ask how well he's taking the audience's or his own. But what about that damned crew of filmmakers, how are we to explain their fever of cruelty?

Yates' joining-in during the rape is, from a narrative perspective, hard to fathom. His fiancee is witnessing this. We know, from prior events, that he is not lacking for sexual release thanks to her, just in case anyone wants to try that horrible old defense (and by "defense" we mean explanation, which is what we still seek in the face of the actual deed). For the purpose of shocking the viewer with the sting of outrage simply filming this would be enough to include Yates with his fellows as a scumbag-- does Deodato think Yates has to join in so that we get it that he's not just an enabler of evil, but an active participant? Well, it's his status as enabler that makes Yates terrifying, and it'd be more than enough for us to root for him to meet his grisly end.

The Grisly End that now descends very quickly upon them-- only allowing time for the poor victim to meet her even more hellish end first and for our merry crew to document it-- poses its own representational dilemmas. When Yates looks upon the impaled girl with that smug look of admiring titillation (does he wish he thought of doing it himself?: admittedly, I've toyed with the idea that the documentarians did this to her, but aside from the straight juxtaposition of rape and her death there's nothing to demonstrate this, though perhaps it is still a legitimate interpretational possibility) before snapping into the all-aghast bewilderment of the humane Westerner for the benefit of his camera, Deodato is cleverly, I feel, underlining the toxic amorality of Yates' filmmaker's gaze before we dive into the final orgy of mayhem, in which we must remain conscious of Yates' proximity to the murders of his pals (which adds the horror of suspense and "identification" to that of witnessing the carnage already underway) and also remain reproachfully aware of his demented, appalling and even self-destructive dedication to his "film" at all costs. We are thus voyeurs who are at the same time invited, prodded to reflect upon the voyeurism of the camera's lens and of the man wielding it. Should we imagine Yates with that same amazed grin on his face as Faye is gang-raped, beaten and beheaded? We must, at any rate, recognize that Faye's indictment during the rape of the young cannibal has come full circle: Yates is assuredly wasting film, because he should be running for his life, and he'll never get to use it in his film. Small consolation for Faye, whose terror, violation and death have become just another slice of entertainment. We should remember, lest we fall to meditating on the question of how this woman could have ever entertained setting up home with a man who would film her being raped and eaten, rather than make any chivalrous effort to save her or at any rate sensibly run for his own life, that to Faye another woman's rape was cause for complaint only as it wasted film.

Except I wish Deodato had set things up a tad more clearly at the end. Not cinematographically-- the footage is horrifically believable as something filmed under the circumstances assumed by the story. But the weight of events is not entirely clear: when Mark (?) yells at Yates to think of the film, is he telling him to give up and run away today to screen tomorrow, or is he telling him that Faye's capture means he should go and catch another scintillating reel of mutilation and torture? Does Yates shoot the blond guy to make sure he falls into the cannibals' clutches (as some have read this), thus assuring him something new and exciting to photograph, or is he putting him out of his misery (which, even allowing a mixture of these motives, is hard not to take gratefully, since with that spear in him he wasn't really going anywhere, and I think the niceties of the Terri Schiavo lobby would quickly fall mute in the fact of the treatment his body receives here)? It's possible to imagine, if one is so inclined, some tremors of emotion in the act of filming Faye's demise-- some desperate desire to simply record, in the face of his own inevitable death, or to understand what is happening to her or will happen to him. And this, of course, is actually a central motive on the part of the viewers of horror films. Terrible as the prospect is, noone will watch this without trying to grapple, albeit impossibly, with the infernal torments that the victims are subjected to. And with Faye, coldblooded hussy that she assuredly is, it's impossible not to identify with her, since she is the most "humanized" victim in the film. Yates, by contrast, goes out in a bloody close-up that tells us nothing about the state of his own internal organs, whether already 'tenderized' or indeed gone upon their route through the bowels of a politic convocation of cannibals. It's his masochistic narcissism, the almost tender look he bestows upon his camera, like some male starlet ready for his close-up, that gives "Cannibal Holocaust" its most penetrating moment of insight into media narcissism. Faye's operatic death-agonies (note the way Deodato taunts the viewer with the cut to the 'uplifting', and here almost sadistically schmaltzy, title music, before cutting back again to the Atrocity Theme) punch the gut and perhaps even pull at the weary heartstrings, but Yates' death-portrait stings the intellect.

Back to the bus: Crouse revisited

2007-09-06T18:12:00.000-04:00

Reading journalistic reveal-it-alls can be draining, as most youthful vices are. One furtive weekend at the public library you pick up, say, David Halberstam's "War in a Time of Peace" and proceed to knock off a couple'o'hundred pages while trying not to elbow your latest empty can of ginger ale off that natty old sofa's armrest. What a wealth of information! What dazzling portraits!-- What ACCESS the man has! --Now flash forward a few years: Halberstam bites the empty ginger ale can, you hear him honored with a rebroadcast of an old Terry Gross interview on Radio IQ. You notice how Halberstam starts rolling into his answer before Terry ever gets to finish a single damn question. You pick up his book from the discount bin at Barnes & Noble (ok, you picked it up several months before he died, but we want to hone a dramatic anecdote here, right?) and reread it. You notice how suspiciously admirable so many public servants are-- are these his sources? How does he know Bush wanted Powell to be his running-mate in '92-- did Colin write this stupid book? Who is he to play Proust with a cast of 200 real people, and who could ever figure out Yugoslavia's mess or give a hoot about it? I read this book twice, plus Warren Christopher's memoirs, and I couldn't explain Yugoslavia if you put a gun to my head.

Timothy Crouse's "The Boys on the Bus" can be excused on several of the above counts. Its prose-style far excels that found in Halberstam. It's protagonists are not Eagleburgers and Sandy Bergers weary of carrying the world's weight on their shoulders (or their undisclosed documents disguised under clothes) but journalists, many of whom still ply their weary trade. You may not come away from Crouse with a clear idea of how the 1972 Presidential election was so monumentally lop-sided, but you may score some insight into why David Broder is so anxious to salvage the honor of Karl Rove. And finally Crouse (dare I tip my hat to wikipedia?) apparently never struck any Faustian bargain to become the next Bob Woodward, contenting himself instead with the humble anonymity of success on Broadway. The only thing left to complain of is the suspicion that some anecdotes may have received the tightening that felicitous forgetfulnes, or judicious editing, might impose; but then, when did journalism ever sound at all like real life?

The first anecdote in "The Boys on the Bus" to make me grit my teeth comes when Broder and Marty Nolan rake Ed Muskie over an unreasonable set of coals after his underwhelming (only 46$ of the vote!) returns in the New Hampshire primary. Muskie lashes out with his famous temper, but that's hardly what's interesting here. Even Crouse seems careful not to show indignation over what, to me at least, seems a revealing display of unreasonable expectations on the part of the press. Here they want to know what his returns mean for the forthcoming primaries. Well, what kind of a question is that? And what kind of answer could satisfy it? Muskie's snappy reply sounds to me quite satisfactory: "I can't tell you that"; "You'll tell me and you'll tell the rest of the country because you interpret this victory . . . " (45). At which point Nolan loses it, shortly afterwards berating the Muskie crew with "I've taken three and a half years of this kind of shit from Nixon and those people, and I'm not gonna take it from you pricks" (46).

This saucily moralistic outburst vividly illustrates one of Crouse's key insights in his book: with friends like these, liberals don't need enemies. Though Crouse lays out the case on his own later, this vivid anecdote clearly shows how a press, raging impotently against its servile condition under a conservative administration, can then lash out with undue vehemence against 'friendly' liberals. That Nolan "takes" crap from the Nixon people shows that, in three and a half-years he hasn't found a way to roughen them up-- a dispiriting show from the supposedly free press. By what right can he demand something different from Muskie, especially since the entire question he insists upon receiving a satisfactory answer to is essentially vague and undefinable, only an invitation for the candidate to draw rope with which to hang himself? Whyever should Muskie take the bait?

This rancor against the Nixon administration lies at the heart of one of Crouse's most relevant ideas-- an idea upon which the media has since pivoted. He clearly is steamed at the Nixon White House for what he views, with his peers, as stonewalling with regard to campaign information. But the, what exactly is the 'information' they're looking for? While Watergate and Vietnam steadily churn somewhwere in the backwaters of public awareness, the White House press corps wants to know: is Richard Nixon a candidate in 1972?!? Now, one might think the question utterly scholastic, but the press seems hell-bent on forcing Ron Ziegler to admit that the President is also such an unpresidential thing as a candidate. Disturbingly, I couldn't help but admire the skill of Nixon and his people in keeping the message focused and framed according to their desires. More disturbingly, the press today feels so too-- for what constitutes the vaunted "discipline" and "professionalism" of Hillary's campaign if not the very same skills for which the Nixon team is here condemned? In '72 the assumed liberalism of the press made them privately steam over their servility to Nixon; today, any leader who can't instill in them that same servility is thereby, in their own reckoning, not fit for high command! Indeed, instilling servility must be the ONLY requisite today, since George W.'s administration has shown facility in no other department, and Hillary has been unforthcoming with any concrete agenda besides Framing the Message.

But frankly, Nixon's '72 campaign appeals to me: the brooding RN, snug within the walls of his Forbidden City in an august display of composure and authority, hand-outs and Danishes meticulously bestowed upon the waiting press. I laughed with glee over his little New York rally, the token war-protestors stealthily admitted so he could wheel the cameras away from them to the thronging masses of children cheering. And why not?: grimace however we may, his Middle America was real; and if the hippies themselves debarred Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey from office (for godssakes, LBJ wasn't "toppled"! [88]), it was Middle America that asserted its control with Nixon's victories, especially in '72. The one thing I really miss in Crouse's account is any real acknowledgment of the madness and folly of the McGovern campaign; yes, it's there briefly at the Convention, but then Crouse considers Miami well-behaved. Well, if the standard is set by the riots of Chicago in '68, then sure; but can a convention be considered a success that pushes the acceptance speech "out of the prime-time hours" (164)? If I remember correctly from VH-1, McGovern aired during prime time IN HAWAII . . . .

A Novel is a Novel ain't a Novel

2007-08-14T23:18:00.000-04:00

When is a novel not a novel? There must be a reason, after all, why booksites feature mature adults boasting of their preference for YA books over regular new novels. And oh yes, it does have something to do with the beaming and boisterous self-conscious "youthfulness" of us all in this shiny dreary new millennium. And yes, it also has to do with the fact that Education Factories produce public schoolteachers who think YA comprises a "literature" all on its own (a literature of the oppressed!!). And yes, damnit, it has a little to do with the sneaky way YA rocks . . . But this is not my point.

No, the question of when a novel is not a novel has been forcibly sprung upon me by my late reading of Iris Murdoch. The acclaimed Platonistic philosopher and notorious bisexual gaddabout was a dim presence in the back of my mind thanks to various "New Yorker" profiles before she sank into Alzheimer's and death, as subsequently "documented" in "Iris" which, I say thankfully, I have not seen.
But lately I turned to the fiction aisles at my local public library-- a zone I generally miss altogether, too absorbed in checking out the entire philosophy shelf again or trolling about for forgotten tell-all memoirs of the Carter administration. But lo and behold, we are generously stocked with Murdoch, damn near the entire canon, and I was stunned into indecision by the extent of the riches on display. I finally settled on "An Accidental Man".

The bookjacket publisher's copy asserts this to be "iris Murdoch's longest and most brilliant novel, very serious, very funny." Okay, we know we're in trouble, right? Already the experienced reader, otherwise oblivious of Murdoch's work, will say "Ah, yes, it must be Murdoch's "It"-- the once-great novelist bites off too much and unloads a great amorphous blob of a novel, pretentious and straining for 'significance'--right?" After all, it takes place during Vietnam-- or was that simply "the war" because, I'll be damned, I'm not sure that the book ever mentions it by name.

Now, I don't know how Harold Bloom rates "An Accidental Man", though he rates Murdoch rather highly, albeit as an author of "romances", in the Shakespearean/Hawthornian/cyberpunk sense of the word. And yes, suffice it to say we're not exactly in the realm of normative realism. But "An Accidental Man" is a hell of a book, full of matter to chew on, bulging with memorable dialogue, shifty situations, characters both endearing and hateful. Thank god I didn't actually READ it though!!

--Now, if I HAD read it through I don't think I could tell you if Vietnam were in fact ever referenced by name. I'm that kind of reader, for all my word-for-word religiosity, but also, it's that kind of book. Murdoch is seductive, and as choking as a bog. Like many a library book opened at 1:00am, "An Accidental Man" became a skim-through, a four-hour breakdown scannathon, eagerly surfing straight ahead to see just what fates would unfold for these strange people. And with all the guilt, I thought to myself too, "Oh thank god I didn't give three weeks to this book!!! It would have KILLED me!!!"
Because if Francesca Lia Block doesn't exactly tighten the rusty screws on her leaky plots, Murdoch doesn't either. And if Block laddles whimsy on top of myth, Murdoch laddles myth on top of whimsy which, she being a great thinker and probably a better writer, means that her books are still more imposing creations, but they don't register so well as "books". For readers like me, for whom a novel means Jane Austen or Choderlos de Laclos, reading a volume by Roth, Bellow or Murdoch can feel like an act of mental masturbation, like reading Elizabeth Wurtzel's memoirs or Thomas Friedman. Who are these people? What are these lives? And what are these arbitrary collections of authorially-imposed happenstance, all as inscrutable and thoroughly acausal-sounding as the dumping I received from my solipsistic Albertine who reads her Proust upstairs?

Lest I seem reactionary, let's recall the mistress of compact witty surreality, Muriel Spark. In her fiction, the Author, the Characters, and God all seem to be schemily competing for precedence as the authors of all-encompassing plots. Cruel chance-- or is that the "providence" of her detached deity?-- can govern all. Yet her characters register on the mind's eye with dazzling sharpness of outline, even those who are mysterious or unknowable. Nicholas in "The Girls of Slender Means" and Sandy in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" are especially mysterious in their 'state of grace'-- if they're hard to fathom within their novels' main stories, it's even more of a challenge to grasp how they've become the people they became-- but we know that we're grasping something real, tangibly in our hands, when we consider them. But what do you hold when you scrutinize Matthew or Dorina? These characters may have their rewards, but their arbitrary construction brings this reader at least a lot of pain-- in part, the suffering born of empty calories. Their bizarre antics set my teeth on edge even as I'm forced to chew down on them-- and my digestion! . . . --Of course there are other sorts of rewards, entirely less ambivalent:

She had loved him always, thought of him always. Love is not time's fool and rejects notions of exact measurement. How many hours per day of thinking about the beloved counts as being in love? Such ideas are absurd. Love laughs at locksmiths and also at Locke. Love belongs to the ideal.
(pg 388)

But when I think of Mitzi and Mavis (oh, bother these names!) the solipsistic sisters of Block and Cohn and their acolytes seem less offensive. Are Violet and Claire, Echo and Barbie less real than these fanciful ideograms? Is effusive self-pity more charming in the thrice-married and middle-aged than in chain-smoking teenage outcasts? Oh forbid! Thus does Block advance one step closer to canonicity.

Brave New Gilmore Girls

2007-07-06T00:07:00.000-04:00

I've spent too much time and energy belaboring this in other forums today, but let's briefly note the situation from Montreal. God bless reproductive rights, but it's time for a little more engagement on the question of whether it's ethically acceptable, or legally tolerable, for people to jostle about eggs and sperm with limitless abandon. I speak not of actual sex: the Thomists among us, alas, have hardly secured my endorsement. Nor do we need undercut the self-determination of identity that is a necessary and beneficent element of any adoptive family by challenging whether the capabilities of reproductive science should be unleashed so as to shove eggs and sperm under the proverbial nose of any prospective parent, least of all if the prospect in question is your own child being granted the dubious privilege of carrying her mother's own egg. People have the right to follow their hearts-- an adoptive child is not mandated to go seeking for biological parents, let alone to accept them when they are found to be inadequate and, more fundamentally, superfluous compared to the loving parents they already have. But, as those who remember the rather chilling conclusion of Jim Jarmusch's "Broken Flowers" will recall, parenthood of any stripe is a double-edged sword when expectation and reality are at oods.

Which is, vide Aeschylus and Woody Allen, always true. I make no pretense that "conventional" or "unconventional" families, the later here including everything that doesn't fall under the rubric of fertile nuclear heterosexuality, are at an imbalance in regards to this question. One of the gravest errors of the species has been the inclination to suppose that anyone must "apologize" for the circumstances of their existence. But, sometimes, an apology may be owed on account of the circumstances one has been dealt due to the choices of others. And in this regard I am inclined to be very indulgent indeed to the acting-up and "acting-out" of the potential offspring of the Montreal woman who has bequeathed her frozen eggs to her little daughter, in the hope ("It'll be her own decision"!) that this child, infertile due to a genetic condition, will have the happy option of carrying to term her half-sibling some day, conceived perhaps with the aid of a beaming suitor's sperm. Whether such a child would refuse to embrace "grandma" as parent, even for a few punishing adolescent years, might be doubted; I have no doubt that "grandma" however would be all too happily obliging. Perhaps the best that could be hoped for is that the two put-upon half-siblings would join together in forceful choruses of "Mo-oommm!!!" to all further demonstrations of her imperial "altruism" . . .

Really, my present vein of flippancy hardly does justice to the moral problems presented by this case; just as it stands, I think the woman has done a rather horrible thing. Rather incredibly, a number of comments I've seen posted have doted upon the fact that "Flavie" (the seven-year old prospective surrogate) would have the consolation of bearing a child that has the family resemblance! Really, decent manners for families that employ donors and surrogacy is one thing, but it shouldn't blind us to the obvious human truth that everyone WANTS to bear a child that resembles them-- this is the ordinary course of nature, after all, and the fact that science has introduced other outcomes as potentialities for the birthmother beholding the baby that has come from her does nothing to change the fact of this desire, for male and female parents alike. In this hypothetical case, Flavie is left contemplating something a bit like the monstrous image in Shelley's "The Cenci", where the heroine's father, who has raped her, gloats in the thought of her forced to behold his hated countenance in their imagined offspring. A birth mother should have something, either more or less, than siblinghood as her prize when she is given the baby from her womb. To carry another woman's egg is one thing, perhaps more questionable than has been allowed of late. But the only blood-relation's reproductive cell that should be involved is her own.

Fleeting thoughts . . . .

2007-06-01T00:43:00.000-04:00

Fleeting impressions by the flickering light of the telly:

I. Gods, why was "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" ever made? . . . as NBC trundles out the last leftovers of the already-cancelled program, I can see why Entertainment Weekly blasted it as the worst show on tv-- though sourgrapes probably has something to do with that judgment! (How the entertainment press hates beging caught backing the failures they help launch with fanfare!) The show is portentous and impenetrable, settling humorlessly over an inert sinkhole of a story, with its depressing and depressive characters stuck there like so many gooed-up wads of hair. What was the motivation behind a single scene in that whole ruckus? Why did Sorkin write it? Why did NBC want it?

II. Tina Fey, I still don't know what makes you tick. I distrust you for the way you treat Lorne Michaels, a patently disgusting man, as some sort of benevolent father. But I love Liz Lemon, I love Jack and Jenna, I hopelessly love "30 Rock". I hate the title, but I quite adore the show . . . .

III. Old Navy's "Summerland" commercial is the hottest approximation yet to Antonioni-in-a-30-sec-boob-tube dose. I'm sure there are a lot of film school retards eager to whore themselves out to retailers looking for stylish, sexed-up adverts that would make David Fincher drool. Those zooms, those lovely geometries of lounging bodies, abstract as landscapes; those undulating bums and Frenchiefied, affectless glances into the distance-- oh, Ridley Scott eat your heart out! Or was that you . . . ?

IV. The Republicans will win in '08. How can they not? The Democrats are atrophied by their inability to think about what they want. An end to the war? Ah, and just who will do that for them?: does Hillary want an end to the war? Could Obama or Edwards actually manage it? Will Americans really be willing to withdraw, considering the scale of the sacrifice and committment in Iraq?
The current Democratic lineup, topheavy with affirmative action candidates, has rendered the Democratic flock undersceptical and prone to dodge real debate. What's the conversation? For godssakes, Dems, talk about resumes, talk about records. Should Hillary pass for progressive on account of her womanhood? Does Barack Obama have a record at all? What does Edwards really believe?-- and how can we know? Why must Richardson be kicked into the gutter of anonymity-- with his record, including his incumbancy in the governor's mansion in a valued Western state. Goodness grief, the Republican voters get all the choices! Giuliani and McCain are allowed to slug it out charismatically, with the competent but slippery Romney a surprising addition. The vitality of the Republican candidates, along with the unpredictability in that camp, lends them a juice-factor sadly lacking in the Democratic fold. Just compare Hillary's promise of "retaliation" in the event of a nuclear strike against America versus McCain's promise to chase bin Laden "to the gates of hell". Forget geopolitics even: do you want a President who thinks about retaliation, or one who promises to chase people to the gates of hell. Give me a Dem who'll chase corporate ne'er-do-wells, porkbarreling politicos, AND Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell! Lyndon Johnson, where are you?!?

Obsolescent Memorial Day

2007-05-27T17:15:00.000-04:00

"I wonder," said the Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot, "what damn silly fool invented Sunday afternoon."
--Dorothy L. Sayers, "Clouds of Witness",58

And what damned fool invented Memorial Day? Was Armistice Day too Eurocentric? Really, I must not only oppose any and all future federal holidays, but ask for the rollback of some of those we already have. Labor Day, I grant, is even more expendable-- what intestinal fit of Progressivism convinced us to adopt "Labor Day"? If it served any use at all, it hasn't been put to it in living memory. Still, there is that matter of wearing whites-- curious, how this Edith Wharton's world detail is the only damn thing any American knows about this holiday-- and Memorial Day serves no comparable function except to remind us that Gas Prices Are Up, thanks of course to our own valiant efforts to Head Off For Memorial Day . . .
Veterans, to be chicly blase about it, are a prickly bunch. Since this is Sunday afternoon, a damn silly fool's time of it, I shall part ways with all my Stoic notions of high valor and put it thusly-- why are veterans so damned hermeneutical? In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, the Roanoke Star has turned white with mournful remembrance, but a few weeks ago the veterans began to grumble-- turn it back to red, white, and blue. Now, I'm sure all American citizens have as much right to lay claim to the symbolism of red, white, and blue, and for this reason I balk at the veterans' community's appropriation, which amounts in effect to: "Red, white, and blue means US, and you'd better get back to remembering US." Now, the present war will have to drag on a while yet (assuredly, it will) before there's any chance of the Roanoke region's being as starkly defined by the incremental casualties from Iraq as it has been by the nation's greatest lone-nut gun-massacre on record. And, since "Hokie Nation" (dismal phrase) commands quite a good deal of patriotism on its own count, it stands to reason that mournful white currently trounces the Red, White, and Blue.
Besides, who says white can't stand in for an army bled dry? I'm always pained by conservative protestations that those serving abroad are so sensitively attuned to the politics of war back home. Don't they really have quite enough on their minds? It's predictably easy to get caught up in the maudlin grip of sentimental symbolism once you're back home-- time enough for that if you make it out. Surely it's ill-advised, froma military standpoint, for soldiers in the field to take very much thought of these things at all. And I don't believe, in fact, that they do. The unsentimental (really TOO unsentimental) truth, acknowledged by so many, is that in combat one thinks of oneself and one's immediate comrades-- not of country, or idealistic international goals. My hope is that, for the exceptional soldiers, this is not in fact true. Animalistic demands for survival aside, the maudlin love of comrades, one's "band of brothers", is far ickier, morally trickier, and yes, nauseatingly homosocial. Kneejerk patriotism is far cleanier in fact-- mock patriotism if you will, but at least it is the loyal defense of the comparably Big Boat of Nationhood, and in a nation as diverse and expansive as the United States of America, we can still be forgiven for sometimes feeling that Our Interests are also Their's. Unlike, say, nationalistic Chechnyans, or even nationalistic Scots for that matter, our "nationalism" is not quite severable from our Jeffersonian committments, perverted as they sometimes are by smug overreach, personal grandiosity, or the malevolent misguiding hand of corporate interests; and being a nation very much at large upon the world, a rational consideration of our interests is never far asunder from consideration of the global picture.

But back to being a meanspirited ass. Just as our cup of federal agencies continuously runneth over, so too do our holidays and memorials. The World War II monument in Washington is the most notorious recent example. To the veterans who hankered in front of the Senate, saying quite brazenly that they wanted to see the memorial before they died, I answer quite boldly: you've waited this long, now do you want to ruin the Mall forever for future generations because you want to see some Mussoliniesque monstrosity before you go? Hell, didn't these guys see enough of these things when they liberated Germany? Alas, I fear Tom Brokaw and Steven Spielberg became history teachers to those who lived it. Having silently reintegrated themselves into society (concealing howsoever many psychical scars in the process, to whatever ruinous effect) and having watched with some indifference the revelations of Vietnam-era traumas, the elderly WWII vets found, at last, that their sufferings should be told. What was once public history-- the murderous march of Blitzkrieg, the invincible counterthrusts of Zhukov and Patton, Nimitz and MacArthur-- became "tell us your story, grandpa." The crusty dads who smacked their sensitive hippie offspring about finally came into their own in the Age of Oprah, an army of Anne Franks, the blighted youth of a sacrificial noble cause. --To be sure, this is not an opportunity all have availed themselves of (can one imagine George H. W. Bush even making a serious attempt at such?), but sufficient numbers came forward to bask in the belated attention, never mind they reserved a seat for Tom Hanks too at the Battle of the Bulge's reunion party (it's like he was practically THERE!). In short, World War II became big infotainment, and a rather greedy relationship was sprung between the media and the vets, diluting the credibility of both. The dizzy zenith was already reached when the Department of Veterans Affairs put out a William Castle-style warning for "Saving Private Ryan", to the effect that vets might have a heart attack!!! Needless to say, Terence Malick's artier, and truly artistic, and very violent "The Thin Red Line" received no similar, sensationalistic thumbs up, way up from the concerned Feds. It's taken for granted here, as Godard has bitterly and correctly diagnosed, that Spielberg can own anything-- our anointed Capra's take on History must always be True, and Conclusive. In collusion with Tom Brokaw, our modern Thucydides, it's World War II Inc. No wonder every Veteran of Foreign Wars is an armchair hermeneuticist.

But why can't Veterans Day suffice? Perhaps semantics is another fashionable skill of those who have had military service: we memorialize the fallen, and vet the Veterans. Take to the graves in May, and do an oral history project in November. Pale November is surely the hour for all these onerous duties: cannot soldiers appreciate the superiority of poetry over hermeneutics? Is it not better these things be done appropriately, with a sound sense of remembrance in its proper season? These fools on the highways are heading for the beach, not Arlington! So here then, is a sober, serious thought: November 11th, dyed in the false hopes of a War to End All Wars, is the most appropriate single date for modern peoples to commemorate the service of the living and the fallen. Soldiers, don't segregate yourselves. Let all nations do their work of mourning and remembrance for all who have borne arms and bled for their country on one cold November day.

Rock Me, "Amadeus Director's Cut" (Part II)

2007-04-14T13:49:00.000-04:00

Two more viewings, the latter in company of the helpmeet, assure me that I will become no stranger to this film. In terms of visual and narrative exuberance it smashes such would-be-frothy concoctions as "Marie Antoinette" against the hearth. It comes at the viewer with all the unbridled over-the-topness of the greatest cinematic extravaganzas-- "Ivan the Terrible", "One from the heart", "Heaven's Gate". Add to that its outpourings of music-- by definition incomparable-- and its definite, though majestic, storytelling gusto, and it's impossible to miss why David Thomson saluted Forman on the occasion of "Amadeus"s 1984 release as the new Vincent Minnelli.

Two sequences may illuminate this particular aspect of the film. The costume ball, with its giddy game of musical chairs and the bearing-in of a roasted ox, winged cherub mounted athwart it, is as unabashed in its visual indulgence as the great opera sequences staged in the Tyl Theatre. Its dramatic content is to detail Leopold's real mission in visiting his son, and to germinate in Salieri's mind part of his later program for destroying Mozart. It also gives us a supreme example of Salieri's unnerving masochism, as he offers his own name for Mozart's forthcoming ridicule. "That was God laughing, Father" he tells the priest to whom he recounts his tale, ultimately not in quest of absolution but in the pride of discovery. "Someday I will laugh at you." With the blowing out of his candle, the original release cut to the beginning of the Figaro saga that occupies the film's middle section and represents Mozart's halcyon phase, as all worldly obstacles seem to dissipate until the Emperor's miraculous yawn topples his every chance of success.
Now, in the new version the composition of "The Marriage of Figaro" and its attendant difficulties occupies quite a larger chunk of the story, and we know throughout that Mozart's fortunes are very far from secure. Originally, we might have taken issue with Leopold's accusation "they say that you have debts" (though we know it would be foolish to doubt the pragmatic Leopold on this); but now we see Mozart hitting up Salieri himself for a loan. This thread is interwoven with the quest for pupils, a theme introduced right after the successful premiere of "The Abduction from the Seraglio", one which previously was but a footnote. In the Director's Cut the battle for pupils grows from a tertiary friction with the Court into a full-blooded contest, pitting Constanze against Mozart (and driving her to throw her body at Salieri), giving Salieri occasion for a dark machination worthy of his diabolical declaration of war with God (his molestation charges against Mozart before the Emperor, which immediately follow it), and allowing one of the film's most riotous exercises in comedy, as Mozart attempts to give a music lesson to a nervous nubile jungfrau while her philistine papa (Kenneth Macmillan, always a riot), her maman who cuts the air with bent arms to Mozart's music in a pattern familiar enough to those who have seen old ladies attempting to accomodate themselves to a hip-hop rhythm at a wedding (or to those familiar with my helpmeet!), and a gaggle of noisome mutts all look on while making as few concessions to pedagogical decorum as could be imagined.
Now, in the midst of this "Figaro" Act of the film, the party sequence acts as a sort of-- well, not idyll, since the most idyllic scene in the film must be the outdoor performance of the Piano Concerto No. 22, whose finale seems to delight Constanze and Joseph II in equal measure and which may be regarded as the height of Mozart's professional career in terms of the film-- but perhaps a kind of jubilee or Roman triumph, as even Leopold must bear witness to the dear Viennese' love for his wastral boy, and Salieri feels himself at his lowest ebb. After all, those are HIS Viennese who whoop it up riotously over Wolfie's grimacing, grunting, fart-blowing parody of the Court Composer. The bewigged beauties who patently dote on Mozart, the little boy who seems to stand in for the child Beethoven who would draw sustenance from his interview with the maestro-- they prefigure the women of "The Magic Flute" who carouse with Mozart in the cabin, and the children who step up behind him as he conducts the Queen of the Night to get a closer view, as our closest proxies within the film, who give Mozart the absolute and unconditional adulation posterity owes him as his due. Even as Salieri feeds his wicked designs, therefore, this sequence is celebratory, and its extreme extravagance, mingling as it does all the riches of Rococo with perhaps some gestures towards native Czech rusticity (the grotto-like setting, that roasted ox which Forman tells us in his commentary was looked forward-to with great appetite by the extras, except it got past three days before they were done with the sequence and the carcase reeked!) delights the viewer, as so much in this extraordinary film does, with its willingness to place us firmly in the midst of its unstintingly lavish vision-- to encourage us to LIVE inside the film, inside its luminous interpretation of that magically bejewelled place and time-- even as it serves to advance the drama's tensions, to push us into the enveloping tragedy that unfolds.

The second sequence I wish to ponder is the one which certainly does the least to advance anything like "story" in the film-- the parody/pastiche of Mozart operas staged by Schikaneder in his People's Theatre. I've always felt there was something meant to be "political" about this sequence-- that it was Forman's own special gift to the people of Prague, to give the extras (in the guise of poor plebeians rather than bewigged aristocrats) a good show, and to prove that Mozart is "for the masses." On a related note, I find something displeasingly Kundera-like in this scene: Forman's jovial vulgarity seems close to Kundera's spirit here, what in Kundera's very odd scheme would be anti-vulgarity, since "vulgarity" for Kundera means false high sentiment (thus, Beethoven's music is vulgar, orgies are not). Kundera himself introduced Forman to Laclos' "Les Liaisons Dangereuses", which Forman would eventually film as "Valmont", so we may assume that Forman's ideas about the 18th Century were formed in part by Kundera. Likewise, any political message Forman might wish to consider in a 1984 Prague would be invested with Kundera's concerns. The transposition of Mozart's music into a vaudevillean lexicon results in something that might be playfully considered as "silly" but, in brutal honesty, is stupid. Does Forman wish to tell us that Mozart's tunes work in any context, even when removed from the fabric of his own music? Hopefully he does not wish to push this remix-mentality very far; Mozart himself seems to take it in stride as a brash theatre piece, while Constanze stands bravely upon High Art principle ("I didn't like what he did to your opera; it was comic") while insisting simultaneously upon the rules of High Finance ("Half the house? You'll never see a penny!"). Since "Amadeus" is blithely indifferent to the role of Freemasonry in the life of Mozart, the unwary viewer has nothing to guide them into the mystical and late-Shakespearean motifs of "The Magic Flute", but at least they can see that it is all opera and no parody. But the shots of the audience during the parody's performance are a bit of a sore spot for the movie-- one has to accept, with Mozartean graciousness and egalitarianism, that Forman looked for some Real Czechs off the street and put them before the cameras in an "unwashed" state, as if to say-- See that old lady looking for the sausages to be thrown her way? That old lady lives under Communism. Those sausages would feed her for a week. Thus, strangely, the parody sequence may be the populist mirror of the scene at court where Mozart must sruggle to lift the Emperor's ban on "Figaro". In these scenes Forman wrestles again with the spirit of his Iron Curtain censors, under their supposedly obliging noses.

Rock Me, "Amadeus Director's Cut" (Part I)

2007-04-09T22:22:00.000-04:00

Once you've grown past the naive assumption that more is always better, you become, not wary merely, but afraid, very very afraid, of "Director's Cut"s. Once upon a time, of course, you thought of them as a Holy Grail, like letterboxed VHS-- better still, often they actually came together, since either was rare. Think "Blade Runner". Or that restored 311 min. "1900" on Bravo, letterboxed and then censored of all the explicit sexual bits-- the violence, of course, could be safely retained, in all its grisly head-smashing expliciteness; the sexuality too, naughty stuff that it is, was more or less left untouched, but Dominique Sanda's nudity, which I can only assume was in radiant evidence somewhere or other, was gone. Well, it was an experience nonetheless and hey, where else were you going to see any of it?
All of that has changed. Perhaps it came with that "Basic Instinct" director's cut with, what, 23 seconds? of additional footage. Or was it the opposite extreme that would define the self-indulgence of the director's cut?: Oliver Stone packing entire new over-the-top studies in satiric grisliness into his already bursting-at-the-seams-grisly "Natural Born Killers"? Time was, Ridley Scott could rescue a masterpiece from the ashbin of travesty-- "Blade Runner: The Director's Cut." Now he's working on the director's cut of the director's cut, having in the meantime taken his original director's cut of "Alien" and turned it into something of a travesty, in between breaks in retooling "Gladiator", "Kingdom of Heaven"-- who's keeping count, actually? Has he decided who gets to do the soundtrack for "Legend"? Will there be a subtler, boarless "Hannibal"? Will he decide to let Thelma and Louise make it to the bottom of the canyon, or will he stake out his claim to the Pantheon on a three-hour "Someone to Watch Over Me"? --All, more or less, fine films; Scott's a major director, a visual maestro with a definite auteurist streak in terms of theme and story, but should he play Henry James with his entire canon? With the films he had control over the first time around? . . .

The Director's Cut that has loomed largest with me is Milos Forman's new millennium "Amadeus." We can take the 5-hour "Fanny and Alexander" out of the running, since that actually WAS the original conception of the film, with the theatrical version as Bergman's willing response to the logistics of the theatre and the requirements of an international release. But Milos Forman's case is different. A true auteur with a proven record of bending the most disparate literary sources to his will, producing a set of films as conspicuously of-a-piece as any body of work in the cinema, Forman, teamed once again with Saul Zaentz, the producer he propelled to Oscar glory with "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", gave the world his entirely original and personal re-vision of Peter Shaffer's stagework in 1984, fighting perhaps a rather stern battle-of-wills with the nominally compliant Czech authorities, but assuredly not one in the editing room. The 1984 director's cut laid claim to eight Oscars (though cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek and editors Nena Danevic and Michael Chandler would have to content themselves with the British Academy's prizes), and had a good eighteen years to settle in the minds of an international audience. Though some journalist or other scoffed at comparisons with "Apocalypse Now Redux" when "Amadeus Director's Cut" came out, in fact Forman's revision of his own original vision is a more radical departure, not least because the public had a general idea at least of the sorts of things Coppola had left on the cutting-room floor. The new Forman cut returns the film somewhat to the scabrous spirit of Shaffer's play (which itself exists in at least two distinct versions, losing "Cosi fan Tutte" among other things along the way), in the process threatening its own, quite superior dramatic integrity, and dampening its incomparable joie-de-vivre.

Having anticipated this, I put myself in no hurry to view it. But life is cruelly defined by limitations, and whether Heaven or Hell awaits, it cannot be put off forever. Especially since, whether by Forman's own intention or as another clever DVD marketing scheme to force the devoted viewer to purchase ever-new "Special Editions", the theatrical "Amadeus" (I remind you, the ORIGINAL director's cut) is quite unavailable today. Its only dvd release was on an early, "flipper" disc compelling the viewer to turn it over halfway through the film. On the "Amadeus Director's Cut" release, disc two is full of bonus extras. As the endtitles have been expanded, not only to make the usual allowances for the limited number of hands doing digital remastering and the restored cameo performers (hello Kenneth Macmillan!!), but to credit bits of music that have mysteriously insinuated themselves into prominence, whether they were already there or not ("Caro Mio Ben" by Giuseppe Giordani, Michele Esposito, soprano?), I would hardly wish to trust "seamless" same-disc viewing options anyway-- nevermind the horrific object-lesson posed by the fate of Forman's "Valmont" on its MGM dvd, where an ENTIRE SEQUENCE has disappared, with no corrected re-release in sight! For me, even the original endcredits are a part of my film history, and with the zeal with which Forman has reinserted bits great and small, only a separately issued disc could reassure me that the original version is safely preserved for posterity.

It behooves me to consider how drastically the new material changes the entire spirit of the film, in addition to its dramatic cohesion; but I must first note, as the matter has been neglected by every commentator I've encountered, the parts that are MISSING from this new version. Thankfully I have the vhs widescreen release of old "Amadeus", as well as the rather poorly transfered pan-and-scan from "Republic Pictures" (this released somewhere between the much more pristine HBO home video on which I experienced the film the first sixty-odd times, and the later Warner Bros. release); but these will not avail me here, as I admit I haven't consulted them lately. But I have quite clear enough a memory to assure me of two particular points concerning the soundtrack, and another, almost as certain, about a precious slice of film I miss in the "Director's Cut."
Inscrutably altered is the voice of the operatic party-girl during the bacchic costume ball, who once offered the pleasing suggestion (to the audience at least, though Mozart, against his real taste, demurs) "Play Handel!" In deference to the thrilling uninhibitedness of the original voice, we should write this: PLAY HANDEL!!! It's a trilling, greedy songbird sort of voice, utterly appropriate and for me, utterly beloved. Shockingly, there is now a different voice altogether, and all it has to offer is, "Pl'handl". --I can only imagine that Forman had once re-dubbed a poor bit player's wilty voice and now, perhaps out of patriotic deference to a native Czech, has restored her own utterly banal voice to her mouth. But this new voice clearly does not belong to that delightful orifice, and I am outraged. Did someone in the Zaentz compound have a Nixon-secretary moment with the original track? Has 1984 "Amadeus" been consumed by flames?
Equally certainly gone is Roy Dotrice's unforgettable offscreen barking at Constanze and his overburdened son as Mozart returns to work on "Figaro". We are now allowed to see that Constanze opens the door to accept Lorl's services (well, obviously!) but we are denied, in the interest of hearing more clearly Mozart's music (never mind that it is, for dramatic purposes, interrupted and interfered with on innumberable occasions), the pleasure of "Parties all night! parties every night! . . . dinner at eight, dinner at ten, dinner when anybody FEELS like it: IF anybody FEELS LIKE IT!!!" How the devil are we to appreciate the full weight of Leopold's impossible disapproval without this, its single most magnificent outburst, all the more effective as it shows Leopold always hovering over his son's consciousness even when he isn't in the room, impossible to escape even from the sublime heights of musical inspiration.

For in place of the diffident hero-villain of the original film, who wars early with God but only becomes earnest in his war with Mozart once Leopold is dead and he conceives his diabolical way through the storms and stress of "Don Giovanni" which split his mind apart, we now have a Salieri whose madness gathers so early and so heavily that the entire film threatens to careen into the abyss opened by the first Act. Now we have a Salieri so malign, so vicious that it becomes implausible that he won't wring Mozart's neck before he can cough out a minor-key Concerto, let alone the Requiem. Before, it was as if Salieri allowed his murderous intentions to follow through a door seemingly (to him) opened by God Himself: after all, it was a "miracle" that the Emperor yawned during "Figaro". In the end, Salieri insists it was God who murdered Mozart; implicitely, it is God's own diffident cruelty with his musical Incarnation that emboldens Salieri to take matters into his own hands. Not so with the "Director's Cut". Here, Salieri tries to force God's hands, and with a homoerotic fervor that was only dimly implicit before in his Chillingworth-like attachment to Mozart. "Enter me!" he cries in prayer, bent over, furious with need, attempting to blackmail the Almighty with the threat of immediate sins he himself can hardly contemplate. This is Salieri on the threshold of his sexual humiliation of Constanze, a sequence matched in its operatic fury only by the original version's staging of "Don Giovanni". Forman rarely cuts in an overt, "cinematic" way, but here he is operatic, cueing a later passage of the C-minor Great Mass as counterpoint for Constanze's undressing as she forces a guileless smile upon herself while she whores for her unheeding husband's career. We are swept up in unaccustomed suspense, the music soars, Constanze's clothes fall, we are upon the brink of we-know-not-what abyss, we plunge into it. Adultery is denied, but the shock is almost as bitter as the threatened reality. We know better than Salieri did, I think, that he wasn't going to follow through, but it is a small and unknown recompense for the blighted Constanze that, had she submitted herself to a willing Salieri, it would have been all for naught. But then, she came there, she was used, and she understands well enough that she lost in a terrible, rigged game she should never have entered into.

All well and good, so far as dramatic fireworks go-- except, first of all, the sneaking suspicion that this scene, though it may be the locus classicus of its type, is of a type nonetheless. A Calvin Klein tv ad of the late 80s or early 90s featured a waif doing laundry (bringing it up on the elevator?) with the "Rex Tremendae" of the Requiem as accompaniment. Innumerable shlock Showtime sleazefests have used classical music to score scenes of arch, goofish debauchery. This suppressed scene may be original in its time, but, for all that it delivers "Amadeus" into R-rated territory, does it succeed in raising the dramatic stakes in the film or only in crusting the palate?
This is the second, and more essential consideration-- the scene damages "Amadeus"s 'sense-of-life'. For all of Salieri's Miltonic soliloquies against the Almighty, the first film was essentially as joyous and spontaneous as all the happier parts of "Fanny and Alexander". Mozart would begin to suffer sad reversals, of course, but they were constantly dispelled by the eruptions of his music. By the end, paradoxically, poverty and even death could hardly maintain a grim spirit against the exuberance of "The Magic Flute"s constant interruptions and the joy of creating the "Requiem". Alone with his nemesis and in his power, Mozart is conscious only of dictating thrilling passages of music to a helpful friend with a big paycheck on the way--pulling an all-nighter to get the latest masterpiece in on time. And wonderfully, paradoxically, Salieri's murderous intentions recede away completely. Never has he been more solicitous; clearly, here in his terrible moment of victory, victory itself seems to be the last thing on his mind. Perhaps this is an awesome misreading on my part-- Salieri wants to get "his" masterpiece finished of course, and he wants to work Mozart to death; but everyone besides the musical illiterate know the damn thing is nowhere near completion (indeed, Mozart's real hand in the "Confutatis" and the "Lachrimosa", which mysteriously gets wrapped somehow in the early moments of dawn, is probably rather less assured than even the film's dictation scenario implies), and Salieri seems utterly subsumed in his role as faithful amanuensis. For once, he is absolutely humble, and it is here, if at all, that the terrible paradox of the "patron saint of mediocrities" achieves a kind of uncanny realization. It is this terrible joy in Mozart's divine music, a joy that can make him forget his own awful self-- the burden of being that terrible selfish man-- that is perhaps what is most lost in the swirl of the "Director's Cut." Thanks to the many new scenes of vehement conniving on Salieri's part, it becomes harder to believe that this man would really come to "Don Giovanni" five times, strangely aghast that he alone has ears to hear a music he has swatted out of public earshot. He is even more of an Iago than ever, but his own malevolent designs, begot of sexual torment, professional arrogance, and a brutal sense of divine entitlement, seem too deafening to allow him much space to wonder, Caliban-like, at the unearthly beauty born of his better. This Calibanesque childishness, if you will, is what made the original film's Salieri so strangely sympathetic (much more so than Shaffer's incarnations); now, the Italianate stage-villain is back and, even without sexual dominion (here too, at least, we may credit Forman with a greater psychological sense than Shaffer, who perhaps missed the "Othello"-borne implications of his own design) is, front and center, an aesthete not of music but of malice.

[On this day, in 1626, that great man Francis Bacon, to whom all but everything is owed by each one of us today, passed away of a fever born of his extempore experiment in the preservation of a fowl by stuffing it with snow. He fell into the Immortal in the noble pursuit of immortality, and there, we may solemnly hope, he is treasured to the full measure of his desserts as he is honored here for his many monuments of wisdom. Godspeed, Francis Bacon.]

Frank, you're lawyered

2007-04-08T23:27:00.000-04:00

There is much waiting to be said: Ferrero on history and the art of statesmanship; why David West's blowhard translation of the "Aeneid" is no match for W. F. Jackson Knight-- and, most of all----------; but that will be seen shortly.

But for now, hats off to "The Apprentice:LA"s Frank.

Donald Trump told him he may not have the polish, but by the time he was through with Heidi, he and "Don Jr." (as if we care about him!) had to concur: he's a fighter.
But Frank showed more than his old fighting spirit. He offered Heidi a cross-examination, and his insistent, levelheaded forcefulness in honing in on the essential points in order to save his skin and compel Heidi to impale herself upon the stake of her own responsibilities was positively dazzling. The Trumps may think he's the boy for the construction sight, but if he's not the apprentice, a law degree may not be far behind.
The man has polish. Frank, I'm rootin' for you . . . .

The 5 Greatest Geniuses Ever (for Yahoos)

2007-03-28T13:56:00.000-04:00

In feeble response to some mindless, inscrutable and (for my purposes) unsearchable askyahoo featurette, in which the popularly approved response consisted of: Stephen Hawkings, Einstein, Bill Gates, Marie Curie, and Louis Pasteur, I offer in brazen contempt the following:

1. Leibniz
2. Mozart
3. Francis Bacon
4. Alfred North Whitehead
5. Alexander the Great

Well, I AM being facetious; though, in terms of raw mental power alone, or in sheer fecundity of intellectual ideas, I can only fail to imagine which human being of history could possibly match Leibniz. Artistic production is a different kind of fecundity altogether, and in that we may well place Mozart ahead of all, ahead of Leibniz too; but as Mozart did not turn himself in the direction of the polymath I feel it only fair to let Leibniz carry off the laurels. If Bacon was no mathematician, he was a philosopher of the highest magnitude, as all the most sensitive souls of Romanticism appreciated (and that despite his obvious place as the progenitor of the Anglo-Empirical and Pragmatic traditions in philosophy, to say nothing of modern science and the Enlightenment itself); and, though I am aware that some, including such disparate souls as Julian Marias and Bertrand Russell seek to minimize his achievements, far the greater number of serious students of his work come away convinced of the awesome fecundity of his mind-- besides his efforts to promulgate the cultivation of material explanations and the discovery of efficient causes, which were fruitful even for Leibniz himself, and his articulation both of modern skepticism (in this the "Novum Organon" is still, I argue, unsurpassed) and of the scientific method (about which much can still be learned-- and perhaps, some things corrected!--by the careful examination of the same work), he is as much a visionary in the realm of the human sciences as Newton or Leibniz in the realms of physical science and mathematics. "The Advancement of Learning" is a still-unexhausted blueprint for the conquest of all knowledge: one may find all of the Enlightenment within it, the birth of sociology and anthropology, a system of aesthetics, a theory of rhetoric, of leadership, of history-- riches everywhere, penetrative discourse flowing outward in all directions, sweeping everything before it. A mere sampling of the "Essays" proves unassailably how nothing could escape this invincible man of thought. Bacon builds his science of the human upon sturdier foundations than any other science devised, and it still soars, Babel-like, above all other works of man. To heap upon him the labors of Shakespeare is equal parts redundancy and blasphemy. Such idle, unfounded speculations are merely intergalactic, for we know of no such species as could maintain such effort.

To Whitehead belongs the mantle of the Modern Leibniz. I can only consider, based upon his seniority and the obvious fecundity of his widespread speculations, that his was the greater part of the "Principia Mathematica." Famous as this work is, admittedly neither Russell nor Whitehead is ever quite accorded the name-dropping relish of a Frege, a Godel, or a Tarski. Perhaps the professional logicians are embarassed at the thought of a fellow logician descending to such a mere activity as building a philosophy (as even Russell, let it be admitted, fell to doing). To this we may add the astonishing, only possibly superseded, and hardly ever attended to, labor of his alternative Theory of Relativity. Then the mass of his processivist philosophy, touching as it does upon many questions of modern physics in a pertinent and unrelentingly probing way, and then his "humanistic" labors, concerning education and the popularization of the fruits of his mathematical, logical and scientific labors, which never blinded him (not, at least, from the moment he turned to metaphysics proper) to the awesome and indisputable role of philosophy itself. Compared to him, Russell is a bugbear and Wittgenstein a decadent Viennese gadfly.

I turn finally to Alexander the Great as a proper corrective to the obvious middle-school edification of reciting such triflers as Curie and Pasteur as world-historical geniuses, to say nothing of the Champion of Men, Gates. It is not to isotopes, or antibodies, but to empires that we should look for inspiration. To me, the regular laudations fed to the young (albeit in the completely vague terms that are endemic to American public education) of such people as Edison, Franklin, Jefferson and Da Vinci are almost as bad as those assignments where I and my fellow pupils had to crib the life of Cortez-- and Pizarro, and De Soto, and the whole lot of them-- out of the World Book Encyclopedia. Doubtless the litany of Conquistadors (at least a dozen of whom we had to know, I swear) has seen the axe of political correctness, but must we flatter the innate geekiness of children by telling them that the schmuck who invented the lightbulb is somehow the superior of such voiceless, unnamed and unknown ghosts as Bach, Plato, Virgil, Raphael? Or that a hundred-year patent is better cause than to build a nation? God knows someone else would've come along and invented the lightbulb in Edison's place-- think of the wireless, or the cinematograph. Hell, even CALCULUS happened simultaneously to fall within the ken of two brilliant minds. And Persia would have fallen too-- but in so visionary a fashion? To begin the dangerous, and certainly violent, work of building a multicultural empire, the astounding work of a youth who lived and died in his charismatic prime-- is this not more wholesome food for the imagination? Wholesome, because such a god will not come again, and because the violent parts add color and fire, the seasoning of the tragic and the extreme, to this exalted chimera, built on the very real sand of a couple of million square miles of territory and stamped indelibly upon not only the imaginations, but the very institutions, of a couple of ensuing millenia, the product of this young man's sweat and vision. Compared to this, all Bill Gates' largesse, flowing as smoothly and slowly as toothpaste worked back into the tube, is as inspiring as Nero opening up the granaries after the torching of Rome. That Gates never dissipated with any Poppaeas or debauched an Octavia (at least, Melinda ain't saying) counts for little in the light of his vapid neo-liberal imperialism, the necessary and expected concommitant of his rise to fortune as the blandest of microbarons. Neither industry nor philanthropy can build lasting institutions-- for these, a polis and a leader are required. Even Seleucus and Ptolemy, in truth, built more lasting and admirable works than the curent Bill-and-the-Billionaires Boy Club of capitalist charity will accomplish.

--And, to carry the day further against our historic techno-geeks: who would say that Petrarch could have written the "Paradiso" in Dante's place, or Beethoven have composed the Symphony in G-minor? Could "Paradise Lost" have waited for Dryden, or the "Phedre" for Voltaire? Yet astoundingly, the "research" tells us that women are more liable to name Einstein as a genius than Shakespeare! Women!! --Let this be a warning, O Educators, of the damned fruits ye sow. Worship your false gizmos, your digital timber and stone, your disinfectant Baals and radioactive Ashtoreths, and profanate your offspring to follow you in your knee-bending abominations! Your sons shall mate with cybergeeks, your swains shall draw manga books beneath their Juliets' balconies; instead of sonnets, ad copy shall flow off their spf 30-gleaming lips. Engineers shall couple while troubadours waste away under a forlorn dormroom's shade. The myrtle shall wilt while the lava-lamp glows. Jesus, and you wonder why every college kid wears sweatpants all the time? As in "Brave New World", when poetry is dead, even science lies unknown.

Postscript: I must refer the curious to an essay in the much-defunct magazine "Talk", concerning the non-world-historical stature of Stephen Hawkings, Physicist. The Oxbridge rumor has it (and Oxbridge rumor, O Gaudy Night!, is that very beast Virgil told you about) that his actual achievements add up to a couple of elegant mathematical theorems, unconfirmed by experimental science. His propaganda achievement, on the contrary, is astounding. He has stepped on, or rather, run over, some toes in his ascent to notoriety. Apparently though he contemplates the law of the heavens while listening to his Wagner, this immobile Siegfried has never really slain any dragons. In the enterprise of multidimensional chess, he has nor Einstein nor Newton in checkmate.

The Top Twenty Today

2007-01-04T12:50:00.000-05:00

In the absence of ymdb.com, here's a sample of the films most prominent in my aesthetic database currently:

1. Fanny and Alexander (Bergman)
2. Sacrifice (Tarkovsky)
3. Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock)
4. Manhattan (Allen)
5. La Collectionneuse (Rohmer)
6. Cries and Whispers (Bergman)
7. Ludwig (Visconti)
8. Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent (Truffaut)
9. Barry Lyndon (Kubrick)
10. Prenom: Carmen (Godard)
11. Marnie (Hitchcock)
12. Heaven's Gate (Cimino)
13. Notorious (Hitchcock)
14. Dangerous Liaisons (Frears/Hampton)
15. They Live by Night (Ray)
16. Napoleon (Gance)
17. North by Northwest (Hitchcock)
18. Persona (Bergman)
19. Swimming Pool (Ozon)
20. Laura (Preminger)

I hope Cecile Gaudechaux, Aurora and the other fine interlocutors of our favorite Franco-Anglaise film-fan website will be together again soon! . . .

Campaign '07

2007-01-04T12:37:00.000-05:00

Conventional wisdom insists that governors make the best Presidents. How little such pundits must have mused on the careers of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton may be doubted, but the passing of Gerald Ford and the eulogies bestowed upon him should give occasion to point this up. Of course all we have heard about is Ford's character-- decent, modest-- and his pardoning of Nixon, along with a predictable offering of fresh hooey from Bob Woodward as to the deep "friendship" between Ford and Nixon, thus at once personalizing and debasing Ford's pardon of Nixon. This is perhaps Woodward's way of having his cake and eating it too-- positioning himself as an official spokesman of Washington's wisdom, the oracle granting the funeral libation, while reminding us all that he is the Oedipus who slew the Watergate Sphinx. But anyone with a passing knowledge of Richard Nixon, that great and greatly flawed enigmatical man, knows right well that Nixon's view of friendship was almost to the right of Napoleon's. Whatever kind sentiments Ford may have harbored for Nixon, RN can hardly have given a genuine fig for Ford-- at least not as a rival president, for all his contemporaries were such deadly rivals, and for Nixon, with perhaps even a modicum of justice, they all failed to measure up to himself.
But Ford, though of humble House stock, managed to hit the White House running in a way that eluded the much more clever Carter and Clinton. It serves as a healthy vindication of the Washington Insider, who knows much more about how Washington itself-- to say nothing of the world beyond, whose violent affairs so little impinge upon the state capitols, least of all in Little Rock!-- runs. Nominators of presidential candidates would be well to remember this, and thus, Tom Vilsack, I'm afraid I won't be taking your number . . .
More offensive, however, are Barack Obama's insinuations of an incipient campaign. That he offers a rather vitriolic explanation of Washington malaise in terms of post-60s babyboomer powerhogging-- something about college bull sessions unleashed upon the corridors of power, if you can swallow that-- leaves nothing to vindicate his own navel-gazing generation's pretensions to run things better, if it actually has any real pretensions of running things at all. After all, politics is an old man's game. It is, however, the perpetual disease of rank-and-file Democrats to lust after a Jack'n'Bob figure who can embody all that "youthful vitality"-- never mind that Kennedy's political virility, and perhaps the other brand too, was readily outstripped by that of the indefatiguable Lyndon Johnson. For god's sake, can we agree the Kennedys are unmasked already, and move on! I imagine Obama devouring "The Gospel of RFK" and writing his playbook accordingly. That Kennedy's response to the crisis of '68 wasn't exciting I won't try to prove, but his specifics were probably patchy enough then-- in today's unthorough times, I expect much less from Obama, and I expect I won't be surprised. Howard Dean, now's your hour!

An Unbreakable Webb

2006-11-08T11:21:00.000-05:00

The presumptive elevation of Jim Webb to the Senate seat in Virginia is perhaps the most gratifying thing, for this Virginia Democrat, to happen yet, during the unfolding elevation of this red state to Another Shade of Purple. The laconic, cheerily gruff Webb, for all his Reaganite background, is a radical centrist's dream: campaigning in all-out, hit-the-rural-counties Mark Warner fashion, Webb comes across like a butcher Bill Clinton: with an adorably slight pudge about the face, Webb exudes the positive energy that beaming crowds trust and adore, yet has a mental wireiness that made him the easy champ in his "Meet the Press" debate with Allen. That energy has been crucial to his campaign style, but more fundamentally, it informs his political vision, and will almost certainly make him a maverick Senator, and perhaps a highly visible one too, nationally. Certainly the Democrats owe him enormously. Toppling George Allen, a not-so-long-ago Presidential-hopeful frontrunner, spells the almost-certain doom of any repeat of the Bush presidency in the near future. The silky-rough contours of Allen's faux-populist persona, with its endless repetitions, both in person and in his ads, of moronic ad hominems about his "opponent's Washington allies" (before this election, where were allies to be found on Capitol Hill for a Democrat?) and about "how we do things in Virginia", had been carefully cultivated through a long political career to maximize his star-wattage with Red State voters. A governor and then senator, Allen was a bona fide star in Virginia, and the GOP groomed him vociferously for national leadership. Like Santorum, Allen is a cold customer, a well-oiled political machine fueled by expert and energetic fundraising, and, though perhaps more grinning a creature than Santorum (who, like Frist, comes across as an overzealous undertaker who has proceeded to embalm himself), may have been even more empty as a politician. Both have been dismissed, and the result is that the Republican Party is going to have to seriously shrift about for new leadership; and, though not a foregone conclusion, it makes sense that this should include new ideas as well.

As for new ideas for the Democrats, I don't necessarily feel we're bound for a more "conservative" party. The kneejerk brohaha about 'bipartisanship' and 'moderates' from the stuffed-shirts of broadcasting (yes, I mean you Tom Brokaw!) notwithstanding, these are not Reagan Democrats eager to bolt over to the GOP side. They're new Democrats by choice-- some of them, like Webb, Republicans who became eager to bolt over to the Democrats' side. Many of them have spoken against this war in terms that would make the McGovern campaign proud; almost all are signed on for the increase in the minimum wage. It stands to reason that a version of the McCain compromise on immigration can now move forward. Calculations will be made as to whether a Presidential veto (number two!) of a stem-cell provision can be overwhelmed. None of this means revolutionary change, so there is certainly promise of moderation, if you will. But our tv pundits are not helping us to figure out what 'left' and 'right' mean today, in an America with few committed leftists or overt Fascists. The Democrats seem, as a rule, willing to forgive gun-ownership as a matter of choice, and the fortunate outcome in South Dakota means that Western voters may be willing to begin to consider abortion as a matter of choice too. Perhaps the Democrats are heading for a reappraisal of the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt (not one of their actual ranks, I understand, but obviously a spiritual predecessor!) if not of FDR. David Brooks at least seems to sense that the electorate is craving another Carter '76 sort of figure. Perhaps the Dems can find executive material more suitable. As things stand, Howard Dean's strategy of full competition in all 50 states has paid off, even if many of the gains were won by solidifying the blue blocks of the Northeastern Congressional map. The "liberal" Pelosi will make compromises to keep her new flock faithful to a common agenda, certainly, but lets not forget that the "liberal" Dean-and-Pelosi team (the new Kennedys and Clintons of the Republicans smear-lexicon) won this thing, big, by their own smarts and toughs. They are (in the President's faintly underpraising rebuttals to John Kerry) "plenty smart and plenty brave" to have succeeded in this. And though Mark Warner-- perhaps the most likely, and most exciting, Jimmy Carter redux figure on the horizon-- has announced his certain abstention from '08, Jim Webb carries the Warner-Kaine revolution from the governor's mansion in Virginia up to Capitol Hill. Likely to get along with the silver fox John Warner (a fellow navy secretary of yore), Webb will give his homestate a genuinely centrist, forward-thinking direction from the Senate floor. Undoubtedly the most interesting of the new crop of Senators, Webb has a guaranteed six-year career ahead of him as one of Washington's most exciting and articulate voices.

A modicum of considerations on Janelle, and "Ludwig"

2006-09-08T12:43:00.000-04:00

Pale September, and I am neglecting things utterly. My last moment of triumphal action was, in fact, September 1st, a pale and luminous beginning for this season of ripe fructifying, and I listened in the early light to Fiona Apple's song and then to Mahler's terrifyingly sublime Second Symphony (Zubin Mehta on the Ultima label). These profound and positive agitations-- well, only the Mahler can be described as an "agitation", since the song represents the quintessence of "Tidal"s contemplative, impressionistic mode (may she find it again!)-- reverberate still, and permanently indeed, but they were crashingly interrupted by a banking scare (where's my deposit?!?) and then by a nasty, naked wet flip-flop flop on the stairs (I finally milked that boo-boo on my tricep, as ugly as the worst tie-dye t-shirt monstrosity, for a free spaghetti dinner last night). Well, pale days still ensued, but Fiona Apple did not; and, though I am dutifully making my way through our oral reading of Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis" I am not humored into thinking I am making the best of my time.
Oh, but there has been "Big Brother All-Stars", has there not?! . . . Janelle, Janelle, will you marry me, you glamazon Marnie of the trailer-trash? --She's not trash, of course, but she works tawdry in ways that Paris Hilton would kill for (but then, wouldn't Paris kill for anything?), yet is the true aristoi: like a Greek champion, she masters challenge after challenge, then is struck down by the Fates with that one release of her hand from the key! And all in a moment of epistemic confusion, wrought by Mike Bogey's seemingly self-destructive gambit of strategic pseudo-profundity. Erika is a mere Briseis to her Helen, Dr. Will Ajax to her Ulysses. Though it cost her the city, she struck down her greatest foe to avenge her friends. Howie, Marcellus, you weeping Patroclus-boys, I hope you appreciate it . . . . Janelle, you have given me so much entertainment, such genuine and robust joy; at the height of your showmance with Will, my heart fluttered as never since the darkest wranglings of Valmont and Merteuil in "Dangerous Liaisons." Can these two serpents ever tangle? Janelle, you've worked him around your thumb. Will, you know it turns you on when she makes you do what you say you wouldn't want to do . . . .

But, Gentle Reader, you are missing my palinode to Visconti's "Ludwig", my tone-poem on Poussin's Assumption of the Virgin, and all the other little musings (actually, only one competing negative musing) of the late pilgrimage to DC. But elucidating Visconti's staggeringly executed study in Romantic doom is so daunting a task as not only to escape the reach of my modest powers but to break even the will to consumate what I should consider a beneficent duty. Visconti has given so much, and Berger has suffered so much, as to demand reams of belabored engagement with their work. Especially as it is so rarely seen, and seen here in a fresh-from-the-vault print. Well, if you have the second movement of Mozart's great G-minor Symphony freely available in your head, consider the spirit of it for a minute. Very near the conclusion of Visconti's film-- indeed, probably the very last speaking works from Ludwig's mouth-- you will hear a meditation on the spirit of Night, which ravishingly elucidates both Visconti's glacial tapestry of winter and snow and Mozart's ordered pattern of meaningful blankness. Night is also, he says, the time of heroes, and thus of reason. Visconti's epic is a sensual body gently floating on the surface of Visconti's thoughts, aware of the depths beneath, and above-- its tenderly godlike understanding of one man's, and an era's, plight, and its Platonic profundity of form, of beauteous dazzlement questing for, and astonishingly grasping, the very heights of visionary surrender.

Four times the George Washington

2006-08-30T19:58:00.000-04:00

I spent a good chunk of the morning poring over the selection of George Washington biographies at the local Books-a-Million, pacing back and forth to keep from sinking my plastic account into the hole from which no midnight Hagen-Daaz can emerge for two weeks until the next infusion. Having slurped down Paul Johnson's little "George Washington: Founding Father" tome in the spring, I have come to put Washington in my personal pantheon. Being fixated on the 18th Century, after all, why shouldn't I allow myself to adore one or two Founding Fathers, even if they did conspire to prevent Prince Henry from founding a dynasty here? Colonial America was no Periclean Athens, gods know, and our self-appointed publishing patriots would be kindly thanked by me for putting a cork in all the divinizing of our Founding Fathers. Having the virtue to found a lasting republic is something, after all, but in the fullness of time what is a Scipio or Cato compared to a Haydn or Shakespeare? We need the one just as the other, especially if we are to enjoy works of beauty and pursuits of truth in untrammeled freedom; but it is entirely too much to demand of us all to bow reverently before the genius of a James Madison (more indispensable even than his more revered peers Jefferson and Hamilton!) as if the regular person, or even a regular aesthete, could really respond to a sensible political theorist as a role model over, say, Napoleon or Alexander. Lord knows everyone from Seneca to Alexander Pope to H. G. Wells has tried to moralize us all out of the love of headstrong conquerors, but to what avail? They'd have been better advised just to advertise themselves as rivals and counterparts!: Pope, world-conqueror of wit, or Seneca, conqueror of self-- these have a certain ring! But Jefferson, Renaissance man? Oh please!: as much as I love him, let's get real: his science was shoddy compared to Franklin's, and even as a scientific dilettante he couldn't rival, say, Voltaire or the Marquise de Chatelet; his strictly philosophical arguments (on materialism and the belief in an afterlife, say) were strictly for the birds; despite his late effusions on Homer and Thucydides, he showed little real appreciation for the Greeks, and almost no disinterested concern for literature as art; he's not an original political theorist, and even as a political leader it's questionable whether he really merits the usual Top Four Presidents deference shown to him.

So it's no surprise that I've always loved that curt, rough-around-the-edges John Adams. But Washington was always a mystery. So Johnson's little book, which tackles this mysteriousness straight off, was immediately seductive to me. And Johnson, a crazed Burkean bore of a conservative, is also a terrific prose stylist and a flamboyant eccentric (also a closeted homosexual, if I read Saul Bellow's "Ravelstein" correctly). The author actually tones himself down enough to sound reasonable, and, with his Johnsonian periods and little ruffles of appreciation, his "George Washington: the Founding Father" reads like an 18th Century Plutarch life, lately come to light.
And thus Washington entered my heart and head. A man of icy exterior and Martian soul! A "sensible" man, an ironic and concealed raconteur, little schooled by his tutors but vastly schooled in the world, a native child of Nature who showed his appreciation for the Sublime and the Beautiful through his work as surveyor and as penman (his hand is, indeed, surpassingly elegant). He was born in the same year as Fragonard and Haydn, and I could genuinely feel that here, in front of me all along, was the 18th Century Representative Man of America.
But then Dubya had to stick his snout in! In keeping with his new reinvention as Reader-in-Chief (kicking Karl Rove's ass across the stacks, so they say!), Bush has taken a shine lately to boasting of the "three George Washington books" he's polished off lately (interspersed with Camus and "Macbeth", mind you). These works of scholarship have proven to him, conclusively, that Whatever Dubya Is, Is Right: for in the end, never mind the bitchy public, the losing war, and the Katrina trainwreck, historians will always talk, so who's to say I'm wrong? This historical relativism, doubtless imbibed from leading Student of History Condi Rice, should trouble any college freshman clever enough to get through "The Stranger" or most anything else, since it obviously conflicts with the absolutist tenets of his Christianity (or, more pregnantly, any non-nihilistic conception of right and wrong). I won't be surprised to hear him drop, "Life is difficult, n'est ke-pass?" But how exactly is it that the President's fevered imagination has drawn the conclusion that, since George Washington is still being writen about, History will never make up its mind about him, thus liberating him from the hell of ill-fame, if not somehow mystically delivering him up from the Hell itself which he has, arguably, done much to merit internment in? After all, unless the Revolutionary War chapter of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" has been ballonned by the Karl Rove press machine into a 'George Washington biography', I would assume that Mr. Bush is reading unconflictingly laudatory things about the general who secured independence and who steered the Constitutional Convention through its activities and then governed the new nation for eight accomplished years. All the leading indicators would point to a similarly uncontroversial fate for Mr. Bush's future stature: starkly visible failure inspires little debate. The gabfest Dubya foresees as assuring his relief should be, and almost certainly will be, a cause of terrible consternation in his declining years, though doubtless he will rail against it with his dying breath.
Still, with all the patent nonsense of the Bush Reading List (sixty tomes, indeed!), it galls that he fashions himself some sort of George Washington wiz. The Brian Williams interview clip broadcast the other night on the NBC Nightly News shows Bush in well-deserved pain when all of his "Mr. Williams!! I did my homework!!!" handraising landed him with a demand to submit his book report. "I read three Shakespeares!" he boasted, apparently as a non sequitur to avoid an oral summation on his one Camus. As I've speculated before, graduate level reading is perhaps not to be expected, or demanded, of a sitting President-- let them do their heavy meditating before they get to office! If a candidate has mused deeply on Herodotus and Tacitus twenty years before, I can excuse them for reading only policy papers and Ruth Rendell. But Bush patently has not mastered that level of mental execution-- even common human speech stumps him!-- and neither by experience or temperament has he been suited with the skills that served his father, generally speaking, so well. And so, to spite him, as much as to revel in my love for the Founding Father, I'm going to read more than two more Washington books this year. I'm on your ass, George Dubya, I'm on your ass. And, specifically, right now I'm on Brookhiser's "Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington". Another conservative, yes, and not as elegant as Paul Johnson, but elegant enough, and there'll be more . . .

The smell of cedar in the morning

2006-08-16T19:24:00.000-04:00

The war in Lebanon has provoked much hand-wringing over Israel's failed outcome in the endeavor, to say nothing of all the dismay that drove nearly the whole planet to demand an immediate cease-fire. There has been little in the way of Baconian, or to put it perhaps more malevolently, Machiavellian clarity over what was really desired. If the Bush Administration truely wanted to take the fight to Hezbollah, then they should have done much more to retard the movement towards a UN ceasefire. Would the US suffer such haste in getting out of its own quagmires without wrangling around in search of some advantage, or at least an advantageously-placed excuse for withdrawal? I fear however that once more, in spite of all the cowboy rhetoric and the apparently unhypocritical (however false) protestations that they are always "taking the fight" to the "terrorists" wherever they may be, the Bush boys have demonstrated that they only understand incrementalism. Did they really believe that "degrading Hezbollah's capabilities" would be enough? Do they still believe that "degrading" would deal with Iran or any other threat?
Of course, the Israelis must ultimately be to blame for not pursuing a more decisive (and less reckless!) campaign. Does the IDF, of all militaries, now lack the capability or the willingness to rush a crack division into the offense? After some soul-searching, I've come to the nasty conclusion that I'm Augustinian enough to assert that in this war the Lebanese civilian casualties, though disproportionate, are not unjustified in light of Hezbollah's obvious willingness to operate out of civilian facilities and neighborhoods, the fact that Hezbollah is the aggressor against a state with the means, and obviously the right, to defend its population, and finally-- and here's the "Augustinian" element--the likely complicity of many Lebanese civilians in their recruitment as human shields and fellow-travelers for an anti-Semitic terrorist militia. Responsibility for the deaths of civilians cannot be shunned, but a people that puts itself on a war-footing against a neighbor cannot expect to be deemed positive moral equals. Life for life, the German civilian casualties of WWII should be as sacrosanct as the lives of the civilians of Coventry and Rotterdam, but the German people empowered and embraced the leadership of Hitler and his military and so, as a collective, cannot be excused for having brought unjust death upon their neighbors. Put baldly, the citizens of Warsaw and London didn't ask for it; if the citizens of Berlin and Dresden didn't "ask for it" (and, finally, they didn't), nevertheless, they are complicit in the devastation that was wrought upon them by the Allies in pursuit of the just conclusion of an unjust war begun by Germany and its people. Et tu, Lebanon.
Needless to say, Bush can take his "Cedar Revolution" and shove it, along with the rest of the Rainbow Revolutions that frittered away like another 1848. Let the Marines of "Notre Musique" guard the Paradise of Democracy instead of embarking on a crusade into the Inferno of the Middle East! But too late, too late. I take some comfort in contemplating the moment when the oil dries up-- or rather, the oil-based economy here dries up so that alternative means are finally produced and (here's really what remains to be done) implemented. When that blessed day finally appears, the earth can breathe a sigh of relief, and not only ecologically! What a geopolitical refresher it shall be, when the angry young men of the Islamic world find there are no more petrodollars to finance their designs of hate. Who will they blame then? Who cares. Frankly, the world little troubles itself with the dangerous designs of sub-Saharan Africa, lamentably perhaps. But there will remain only humanitarian reasons for intervention in the Middle East, not strategic ones. With undiversified economies and no more terrorist political-party largesse to provide for the "education" of the boys and other such acts of "charity", these Angry Young Men will find rants against Israel and the West will do little to soothe their starving stomachs. Then again, the British citizens who prepared to dunk thousands of victims into the Atlantic enjoyed all the amenities of Western democracy, some (National Health Care!) that we don't enjoy in the US. And yet-- and yet-- they were willing to throw away life and limb, their own and everbody else's, and for what? A fantasy map of a pan-Islamic empire? To retake Cordoba for the caliphs? To finish the work of Auschwitz? To tell Britney Spears to cover up her midriff? Or do they suspect already that a mere contemplative life of sanctified hatred will not suffice to win them laurels and houris in the Heaven of the Martyrs? Neither Aristotle nor Enlightenment has begun to work on these fractured souls, and it is to be suspected that neither psychotherapy nor elections will readily extirpate this madness. In such circumstances, a really kickass ground offensive sounds like good medicine, but in this present round Israel has failed to deliver the shot.

American symphony, French chamber-suite

2006-07-21T12:52:00.000-04:00

Last Friday brought the first shared viewing of Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" with my GF. Astonishingly, this legendary "bomb", critically and commercially-- perhaps more prejudicial still, a work passionately embraced by French and British film critics when viewed after the fact of its disastrous American pseudo-run-- suited her fancy so completely that she has now enshrined it as her "favorite film of all time"! Well!-- it took me several viewings and a few years before I was ready to nominate it for any Top Ten lists, though I immediately recognized it as a film of interest and of intense visual magnificence. Needless to say, this auteurist extravaganza is not merely postcard-pretty in the Robert Redford way, but an intensely realized visual tone-poem a la Visconti or Bertolucci; cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who also shot Altman's "McCabe & Mrs. Miller", exceeds his previous achievement in every way, lensing with greater richness and resonance. But it is surely Cimino himself, who carves up space with a crane better than any other American director in film history, and whose architectural sense of composition is on par with the most epic-minded of European filmmakers, who deserves the lion's share of credit (and credit is what this film deserves!) for achieving the unique painterly tone of "Heaven's Gate", a tone that extends beyond the purely visual dimensions of the palette into the poetic yet novelistic handling of narrative (a subject on which I must refer the reader to Robin Wood's magisterial tome "Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond") in creating what is genuinely a unique cinematic experience. My last viewings on VHS, some years before my dvd arrived the other Wednesday, had confirmed for me that "Heaven's Gate" is not only readily, but compulsively, viewable (I had devoured it one night and awoke to view it immediately again, with no sense of restlessness at all); in its widescreen splendor it can be savored with more relish still.
It is thus not quite so perverse that my beloved, who has balked at Visconti and runs from "Vertigo" as though it were root canal, has found in Michael Cimino's legendary 'folly' the very "'Gone With the Wind' of the West" that UA's executives were hoping for. Doubtless Cimino and his cast and crew should feel more vindication in her simple avowal than in all my cineaste's bumbling raptures! . . .

* * * * * * * *

But at the moment I am immersed in a more dubious, but most intriguing, cinematic case: Francois Ozon's "Swimming Pool." This classically-composed cinematic mashup (as I reckon it to be) of Bergman's "Persona" and Rohmer's "La Collectionneuse" (promiscuous young woman interrupts the South-of-France idylls of a protagonist who wishes to be left alone, then maybe/maybe not practices an elaborate scheme of deception upon that protagonist, who finally escapes to civilization, in both cases London) also in a curious way flirts, perhaps intentionally, with being taken for a standard late-night Showtime entertainment. That is to say, with its plenitude of female nudity, its somnolent "erotic thriller" musical score, and its sleepy holiday setting, "Swimming Pool" may look superficially like a lot of Hollywood's backdrawer attempts at a "classy" sex thriller, one of those low-budget films with overthehill stars that strives somehow to be a modern noir and fails predictably and fully. There's also that "Murder She Wrote" genre to contend with: Ozon clearly understands that when a thriller puts forward a female mystery-novelist on holiday as its heroine, the audience expects she will turn detective as nefarious dealings are uncovered. In fact, the nefariousness doesn't surface until rather late in the day, and the heroine's role in it, while ambiguous (particularly in motivation) is clearly not that of the moral champion of empirical resolution and justice. "Swimming Poll" is, we might say, a French David Lynch film, in the old-fashioned sense of "French", meaning here that what is blatantly Gothic, and executed loudly in high visionary style by the American director is here restated in a very muted way. So much so, in fact, that even the moments of metaphysical dislocation hardly announce themselves. So much so, in fact, that I cannot be sure they even exist.
I suspect the kernel of Ozon's "game" has to do with a literary substitution for the psychological fractures of Bergman's "Persona". In short, Sarah's book is the substitute for the composite Elizabeth/Alma shot in Bergman's film. So is "Swimming Pool" an art film about literary contamination? Well, this doesn't quite sound right. But if Sarah isn't crazy, and Julie isn't a fantasy projection, her "bad girl" self on the prowl, then the only exchange in the film is not psychological but literary. That doesn't mean, of course, that the film isn't also findamentally psychological in character. But in pouncing on the role of the mystery novelist, Ozon makes literature, or at least certain conventions about genre and about its authors, his theme. That a mystery novelist would lend her talents to covering up a crime may only be a passing joke in his larger statement.

Odds and Ends

2006-07-04T15:26:00.000-04:00

Saturday night I ingested Romero's theatrical cut of "Dawn of the Dead", a much-delayed experience that must soon propel me into the chomping jaws of the deluxe Anchor Bay set with this, the longer Romero version and the Dario Argento European cut, in order to savor all the fleshly permutations to their full. "Dawn" is difficult to digest, not so much on account of gory effects (I hope I won't disappoint those sad creatures like my until-very-recent self who still haven't viewed it by saying that these are decently understated by Troma standards, though well executed and effective as well, in good 70s fake-blood style) as on account of its magnificent intensity, established by Romero's excellent, John Carpenter-like mastery of mise-en-scene and the way his intercutting piles on multiple actions, each wrenchingly suspenseful and slow-to-climax, and lets the audience dangle on the strings while he, with supremely confident composure, allows his horrific adagios to play themselves out at length. By the time the first of our four protagonists has bitten the bullit, the film had already sucked me dry, and I could only admire the ensuing mayhem from an emotionally catatonic remove. But as I'm trying to position the gf for her first viewing, in my company, I may have to put off my next viewing for a few more days . . . or then again, I may not make it till dawn.

Two Saturdays before this last, I cozied up with "Macbeth" for an all-day read-in. I cannot say, anecdotally, how exceptional or not this behavior is: on the one-hand, as plays they are obviously written for immediate consumption in the theatre, and there's no pressing reason why the dutiful reader shouldn't persevere through them, if not in a single SITTING, then at least in a single day. But then, these are difficult works, and not for any banal "thee" and "thou" reasons as enumerated by schoolchildren and their elders (true also of the syntactical minefields of the King James Bible, a remarkable aesthetic edifice but almost unusable today for garnering "doctrine", least of all for the sort of parishioners who cling to it as the only "true" English Bible)-- one should consider how people tack on to the most superficial difficulties as a way of expressing the difficulties that are more real, and more intangible to them) . . . As sublime poetry their individual scenes call for repeated readings right away, as insistently as the plays as wholes demand to be read in submission to their dramatic momentum. And annotations must be consulted too, now or later. Having disposed of "Macbeth" in a single day, I have gone back to certain scenes, but I'm afraid the only truly satisfying thing to do is to approach the play as though you are to star in and direct the thing: read it through, read it again, work over individual scenes as though you were at least trying to memorize the parts (and, at least in the case of the tragedies, there are soliloquies and monologues that demand to be memorized if one is to feel one has really devoted energy to the play), read it again-- in short, go through the thing fifty times in half a dozen different ways as though you were living through a production. That, I hope, is what I will be doing with "As You Like It" shortly, with my GF in tow, for that is perhaps the literary work closest to my heart these years and, I think, the best introduction for her as she begins her "adult" (post-college) Shakespeare reading. -- I must interject, for historical reasons, to mention how I interrupted her reading of "Absalom, Absalom!" last night to force upon her the II Samuel account of Absalom's history as presented in Bates' "The Bible Designed to Be Read as Living Literature". Afterwards, she insisted that it should be edited down and, when pressed, asked why the Redactor of the Torah had also not taken the red pen to the Court Historian! Well, at least she knows about Tamar, and that should elucidate Faulkner's story for her . . . --But, brief and pleasureable as it is, I don't think I'll be giving "Macbeth" my permanent attention anytime soon, for indeed after I polished it off I turned to "Romeo and Juliet", with which I've often had a somewhat resentful relationship, and again took a week to plod through it. I am bent, therefore, to own Zeffirelli's film version so as to make the play more familiar and, God giving me strength!!, I will stop catching it on my throat every time the Nurse opens her (to me always, as finally to Juliet also) hateful mouth. More gratuitously, I may also venture to order "Tromeo and Juliet", which as it turns out features alterna-poster child Jane Jensen, an album of whose I once owned and was actually familiar enough with to play back songs in my head to while away the time waiting at the optometrist's office for my grandmother to reappear. That, to me, is INCREDIBLY strange-- while I continue to adore the Spice Girls, I can't believe I wasted money in the late 90s on so much godawful alternadance music as featured in "Spin" magazine (though I still love you DJ Rap!); and so perhaps it is only right that I investigate this oddity. Well, Time is the judge who must judge these . . . what was it Touchstone said? --And Time must continue to judge the work of the American Republic as well and, of late, its been a sad business. But I shall think of General Washington and his gentlemanly optimism, and hope for our future advancements as we may celebrate those of our past. And, dutifully, I shall certainly avoid the shopping mall, though I indulged in a very fine American lunch at Shoney's today . . . .

Contamination

2006-05-22T19:53:00.000-04:00

While I'm still in the midst of Muriel Spark's "The Finishing School" (somewhere in chapter 15) a few thoughts. While Harold Bloom's meditations on jealousy are not my single favorite aspect of his criticism (despite the centrality of "Cymbeline" and "The Winter's Tale" to my thinking, I can't quite pretend to consider, at least at this date, the theme of sexual jealousy as pertinent to my own life or my creative preoccupations, and as for "Othello" it is perhaps best, for better or for worse, to treat it almost as High Literature's equivalent of a snuff film-- and even Bloom, for all that Iagolatry, doesn't seem quite ready to cede "Othello" full partnership in aesthetic untouchability with "Hamlet", "Lear", and "Macbeth"), I can't approach "The Finishing School" without intermingling his musings on jealousy with those of literary "contamination", since Spark's novel concerns a kind of anxiety of-- not influence, since the competing authors in question have hardly seen each other's work-- but some surrogate form of literary anxiety and agonistics, since the two authors DO have each other's presence, and that seems quite enough to turn our protagonist Rowland, and indeed, the envied Chris as well, quite mad.
I don't know what, if any, opinion dear old bad old Harold has expressed of Spark (she didn't make the countdown at the close of "The Western Canon") but, as a more normative version of some of the impulses Flannery O'Connor represents, she surely is worth his comment, and I will certainly push her forward as destined for inclusion. Indeed, at this moment I feel quite convinced that if I were indeed to ever write a novel, it would be because of the impetus provided by "The Finishing School" and would even be writen in its equivocal shadow. I cannot feel that it is as rich a work as "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", yet I am utterly in its grip and, were it not for the Family's demands for four hours of godless television entertainment this evening, I would be painfully finishing it off as we speak.
Certainly it's painful, not only because of the carefully wrought suspense and the ever-present possibility that the narrative will, if not exactly "jump the rails" in any merely postmodern sense, at least pull off a considerable shocker of an ending (and anyone lightly familiar with Spark's output knows just how quickly those upturned narratives can drop themselves in your lap); but painful as well to be kept from the exhilarating, hair-picking labor of going back through the book at freeranging liberty to pick up on clues, meanings, hints, ambiguities (it's always possible that much of what happens after the last page has already been told to you somewhere back on page 32 or somesuch) and also to savor the delirious comedy of some of Spark's highflying satirical sallies, especially here those "comme il faut" discourses of Nina's which touch Carrollian heights of sublime absurdity.
Since Rowland is too preoccupied with other forms of jealousy, I can't help but admit that I've taken up a bit of sexual jealousy on his behalf (despite the fact that Chris' suggestion of a life-fate for Rowland and his marriage is monstrous and horrific) where Nina is concerned. Just what is that woman's game? Is she a half-baked fetishist of professorial tweed? As Spark must realize, when we read the novel we proceed from horror at Rowland's outrages, the injustice of his Salieri-like escapades and frustrations, and come to identify with this new patron saint of mediocrity-- if indeed a mediocrity is what he is? . . . The more he seems like Wile E. Coyote, the more the reader identifies with his desire to burst Chris' bubbles, the more one feels Chris' Blessing has been unjustly bestowed, the more even one begins to wonder, perhaps to suspect, to hope even with paranoid wishfulness, that Chris is a facade, a fake. And, this being a Spark novel, everyone, almost everyone has their schemes, and Chris the born novelist is a born schemer too, which means that the reader, like Rowland, may ultimately find herself well stocked with reasons to hate him.
But I'm feeling a healthy hate for Nina too, as I say. Self-protective and always looking out for herself, her future, she combines an improbable mixture of abject deference to "scholars" and an equally robust desire, intensely sexual in part but something more, for scholars with some apparently lunatic notions of education and social forms. The key, it would seem, is in her penchant for vague and utterly false name-dropping: a senior official at the UN told me; as was said to me by a late Cardinal, etc. Nina is sick with social-climbing, a particular subset of her own where education is central: conducting her "classrooms" is a form of social hobnobbing for herself, the wifely portion of the life she fantasizes about as the wife of the master of a college of Oxford or Cambridge. The vagueness of this consuming desire of hers makes it all the more of a squeal; when she takes up with Israel, she informs her husband that (to paraphrase, alas!): 'I think he studies art, or history. Maybe philosophy . . . ' Well, something anyway, that's what matters! But what can you expect from a girl who married out of a Rilke thesis?
Now, Rowland is no Othello, even if Chris wants him to be one (and this has to do, I think, with Chris conspiring to out-Iago his Iago by becoming HIS Iago) and even by Othello-standards, he has no cause due to his attempted Celestine indiscretions (an attempt to become the Othello of Iago's imaginings to Chris' Iago, or perhaps to put it more directly, Rowland's attempt at pulling an Iachimo). Sexual jealousy over his wife, though perhaps once an option in his regular life, is certainly an impossibility with his all-consuming Chris-envy. But Nina clearly, at least before, wanted Rowland's sexual jealousy and had her own anxieties over the proximity of the female students, as well as her in loco parentibus concern to keep the girls from getting knocked up by the household staff. Her fears over her husband's literary performance, her fear of his literary impotence, comes out instead in uncontrollable bursts of paranoia about potentially amorous inclinations towards his students. Hence, I feel, the constant airing of questions over Rowland's own sexual orientation. That is the expected line of questioning today, as it was even in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" with Sandy's own (potentially self-incriminating) ruminations, but it's also a way for Nina to get a handle on things: if Rowland is merely in love or in lust with Chris, then maybe he can still write his own novel. Whereas, if this insanity is really literary in inspiration, then her husband must indeed be creatively impotent, and thus must be dumped at the earliest opportunity.
This is all unformed speculation, of course, and not even with the book fully read or in front of me. I doubt I'll survive another read like this this year, though I'm planning on devouring the Everyman Library anthology with "The Girls of Slender Means" and "The Driver's Seat". "The Finishing School" is a sweet open sore in my consciousness, and I'll be picking away merrily at it for the rest of my life. So please, consider it a Great Read.

To pass comment on the goings-on on that despised boob tube: What was the deal with that "Will & Grace" series finale? As someone who only watched the show in passing, I could appreciate it as a well-written sitcom, for what that counts, and undoubtedly a worthwile time-killer if television is how you choose to kill your time. Whether it promoted social understanding is another matter entirely: promoting the centrality of a "fag/faghag" relationship above all other couplings in life, sexual, erotic, or companionable for either the gay man or the straight woman in question seems to have been a perplexing dramatic problem for the show, for a long time. The real question has to do with love vs. friendship, and Life itself is hard on the proposition that friendship can enjoy permanent precedence over love, especially on American television where every beloved TV character needs to Have A Baby at some point! So first the Will & Grace parenting attempt had to falter beneath the wheels of heterosexual inevitability (Grace's marriage to Leo) and then, finally, reproduction had to take place in the "normative" (in the pejorative sense of the word!) context of Stable Monogamous Relationships, both Marriages in fact, even if one was between two gay men (and no, readers of "The Nation", though "Will & Grace" may have blessed us once with a true Jewish marriage, it did not give us a gay ceremony). So sexually disinterested mating finally crumbled underneath the temptations for sexual, and societally sanctioned, nesting, and "Will & Grace" wound itself up by discarding the show's defining relationship as a passing youthful discretion.
But what's really weird is that, as if to pat every American who thought, or hoped, that "Will & Grace" was some sort of latter-day "Three's Company" about a guy posing as gay so he could boink the dickens out of that hot redhead, the show presents us with a meet-cute between Will's son and Grace's daughter who proceed to happily-ever-after Marriage. Say what?! Now, let's be honest: I strongly suspect that even many gay viewers may have felt that, given the show's dramatic dynamics, Grace really shoulda got Will liquored up and blindfolded and given him a taste of the other side of buttered bread. "Believe the tale, not the teller," as D. H. Lawrence would say. Why the hell did those two need each other so bad if there wasn't some underlying sexual tension? But if we're gonna explore that, let's do so honestly, because there is no denying in hell that getting their children of each's sex into bed with each other is Subtext! I mean, this would be richly poetic in one of Thomas Mann's multigenerational epics, but c'mon! "Yes, America, Will and Grace really wanted to get straight with each other, and it's only those dirty gay sitcom writers who have made heterosexuality the Love That Dare Not Utter Its Name!" The decent thing to do would be to have left the two in peace, together without their (at least in Leo's case) highly dubious mates (and if Vince isn't a dubious mate for life, Will certainly is), or else to have shown them old and divorced and lonely. What is this 'our star-crossed kids have picked up the forlorn banner of heterosexual love' crap? NBC and the "Will & Grace" creators have besmirched their credentials as honest celebrators of modern gay life by leaving a big cutesy heterosexist turd all over their legacy.
But don't let me forget to comment on the College Sunrise Fashion Show!!!

Harold Bloom, still the man

2006-05-02T20:05:00.000-04:00

Having nursed Harold Bloom's "The Western Canon" and "How to Read and Why" over the weekend, I was prepared to fire off a few salvos against the great and good man. "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" is a modern masterpiece, a work which helped greatly to clarify my own attitude towards Shakespeare (not "the Bard" for me, please!); despite my essential attitude of disinterest towards Bloom's governing thesis in that work, that Shakespeare is the definer of modern character, not only in fiction but in life, I draw deeply from its insights into Shakespeare's art, his characters, and moreso, from the Bloomo-Shakespearean philosophy of life. Like the eponymous character, nee Allan Bloom of Saul Bellow's "Ravelstein" (though not the Allan Bloom of Allan Bloom's own books), Harold Bloom gives a simmeringly vitalistic meaning to the word "nihilism" which makes even such a normative sort as myself feel there is essential universal truth in Bloom's attitude. But outside of the noble confines of "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" I find myself more often at (affectionate) odds with Bloom. He is wildly, and correctly, enthusiastic about Jane Austen, but tends to forget her whenever he is brooding over Cervantes or Proust as Shakespearean rivals (one seems to never find Austen amid those boys' club litanies). When on the subject of Oscar Wilde's epigrams (remember, all bad poetry is sincere!), which he unblushingly often iterates as absolute truths, he sounds like a garden-variety Paterian, which doesn't quite sort with his Gnostic intimations of sublimity (though heavens knows "Plato and Platonism" drinks deeply of the high Platonic spirit, however subjectively reinterpreted). Bloom's Bardolatry is perhaps the central weakness of his latter-day work, however; if Shakespeare is the greatest of all writers, Bloom isn't content to leave him first among equals, or even-- thus begin the incrustations of dogma-- to fail to establish Dante as anything less than the definite and absolute No. 2 in the Pantheon. It may have taken Bloom some time to figure out just where he stands as a reader, but having committed himself, there are clearly no fluctuations on his Great Chain of Writing.
All of this isn't so bad, after all; I'm just as committed to putting Milton in the seat Bloom assigns to Dante as he is to keeping Dante there! But can't the man even give Milton a page without rubbing it in his nose that Shakespeare is greater, or that Dante "won" the contest? Bloom's obsession with literary characters as vitalistic presences, really so many demiurges unleashed upon the earth, leads him into really idiosyncratic territory-- Milton's Satan must be a cosmological Iago, a failed Iago mind you, instead of a terrible creation of Milton's own great spirit, out of the Christian tradition and in agonistic relation to IT, not Shakespeare!, and endowed with a galvanizingly sublime rhetoric that has absolutely left a deeper impression on me than any of Iago's soliloquies. Fantastic and awful a presence as Iago is, Bloom can't see him simply as a dramatic representation of evil incarnate, a Mephistopheles tempting Othello's Faust to destroy Desdemona's Gretchen (just putting this Goethean cart before the Shakespearean horse would get me quartered by Bloom!)-- my god, man, what am I saying?!-- that Iago is a MARLOWIAN character?!!!? Don't we know that Shakespeare BESTED Marlowe, sailed forever beyond him?! Well of course he did: what are any of Marlowe's rhetorical, aesthetic or psychological splendors against "The Winter's Tale" or "Macbeth", et. al.? But why can't Iago simply be Iago, instead of some Satanic (more than Satanic!) living void, with Hamlet's intellect and (depending on what page we consult), say, Macbeth's prophetic intimations of essential Nothing, or Falstaff's immensity turned inside out, or what have you?
Turning Hamlet and Falstaff into gods also means that all attempts at expressing or, heavens help us, systematizing human knowledge must fail by comparison. For Bloom, Hamlet's restless intellect not only means that Hamlet the melancholy Prince is "the intellectual's Christ" (I agree) but the greatest philosopher, so that, in contradiction to all those mutterings about the moral or truth-value indifference of literature, answerable only to the aesthetic standard, Hamlet's collected utterances comprise the greatest set of philosophical ponderings ever commited to the page (for Bloom that should probably read simply, "committed", since Hamlet himself has, in some funny way, committed them)-- forget Plato, Emerson, Nietzsche, never mind Spinoza, Aquinas, Hegel or any of those other discredited non-aesthetic daydreamers! To what depths has Bardolatry led this brilliant man, that our enormous enjoyment of "Hamlet", our awed sense of its truthfulness to the human condition, our suspicion that it is the greatest literary artifact of all time even, must also commit him to promoting it to the rank of Greatest Philosophical Work of All Time? Even Shelley, for whom Dante, Shakespeare and Milton were "philosophers of the first rank" (again, true!) would not venture so far, for he would recognize that there are separate tasks to be undertaken in literature and philosophy, and imaginative literature cannot ask all the Socratic questions, let alone venture to systematize reasonings, in such a way as to successfully poach on philosophy's turf so far as to discredit it in the way Bloom blithely, blindly does.
But here-- I was going to have a conniption over his astonishing hypothetical that Samuel Johnson had a greater-- he lists three areas in fact, greater imagination, greater good taste, and greater moral judgment, or some such combination-- than Alexander Pope! Ye gods!, must he also elevate Johnson, his own role-model as critic, to more-than-Popean heights in order to affirm the critic's art? Must criticism be rendered central to the canon by undoing one of the authentically great poets of the English language? Johnson, whatever his outbursts of Sublimity, is a deeply 18th Century character, as so many persons of that century are, so mercilessly did it stamp itself upon its children; even Rousseau, that walking drum of dynamite, essentially talks the talk of a philosophe: the content is different, but the manner is the same, and it should be appreciated that in matters of the heart his own heartlessness is essentially the Laclosian norm of selfishness-- Burke didn't succeed in defending his age's gallantries, rather he failed to note what a precious little gallant Rousseau himself was. And the 18th Century is not happy turf for Bloom, who is no rationalist or moralist or materialist. A human being such as Washington, who could favor Addison's "Cato" as his favorite work of literature, might as well never have bothered to exist (and God knows, too true, too true!). Yanking at Pope's heels, I fear, is Bloom's way of fighting another action against the French Neo-Classicists, an argument that fortunately Bloom comes clean on in the introductory pages of "The Western Canon." And with reason-- Jacques Barzun, after all, perpetuates the Frenchie pseudo-Classical disdain for Shakespeare's 'roughness' in the pages of "From Dawn to Decadence", but really-- it's not like we're about to abandon Shakespeare for Racine, are we? or to elevate the sternly classical "Julius Caesar" to the preeminent place of "Hamlet" or "Lear"? "French Shakespeare", as he likes to describe Foucauldian interpreters, is indeed a contradiction; labeling it "French Shakespeare" is also very funny. But can't we let heroic couplets be the lovely things they are? Of course Dryden and company were foolish to make them the ne plus ultra of verse, a foolish and frivolous misjudgment. But that era made many such foolish misjudgments-- they took Voltaire more seriously than Leibniz, after all; they made fun of Plato and Aristotle, and Jefferson wrote philosophical arguments that would flunk him in a freshman introduction-- but they were charming people in their own right, and Pope was also a man of genius, and did extraordinary things that are his own. Perhaps "The Rape of the Lock" isn't an equal achievement in blessed insouciance to "Twelfth Night", but neither is "Twelfth Night" a substitute for "The Rape of the Lock". And even if one chooses to dismiss the "Essay on Man" as Bloom does, Pope was a person of rare moral sensibility as well as extraordinary verve, and Bloom himself should take enormous relief in the unprecedented and unmatchable vitriol of "The Dunciad", as he himself occasionally remembers.
Okay, but then "The New Republic" had to weigh in on his new "Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine". James Wood makes some of the same general points as above, in generally entertaining fashion. But he has missed a great deal on Bloom's new book which, whatever its merits as literary criticism, makes some of Bloom's best post-Nietzschean arguments. Dismissively listing eight separate quotations as examples of "painful repetitiousness", he gives us instead a nice microcosm of the book's argument-- whether or not the book could have been pared down to an essay, as Wood contends, his eight quotations are not indistinct repetitions of the same idea. More troublingly, Wood seems to embark upon a course of selective sensitivity: Bloom "ignores much of the nonsense and fraudulence of Mormonism", whose adherents Wood thus confidently takes on, while he is charged with being "defensively Jewish". "It clearly irritates Bloom that Christianity became so important," Wood charges, also accusing him of "blasphemous ambling" and "ardent blasphemy."
Regardless of Wood's own religious affiliations, it's clear he feels Bloom shouldn't mess around with Christianity, not the real, orthodox stuff anyway. Wood very questionably asserts that, "For him, Yahweh is God and Jesus is only a man pretending to be God: standard fare." By "standard fare" does he mean standard Judaism, or standard wicked non-Christianism? Surely Wood is familiar enough with Bloom's corpus to recognize that he has never asserted himself to be a believer in any theologically-sanctioned God of any kind? Or has he missed the fact that Bloom, like most liberal interpreters of the Gospel of Mark, would assert that the historical Jesus had no pretensions of Divinity? It sounds as if Wood wishes to besmirch Bloom as another blue state Voltaire-wannabe, a blasphemous baby of the 18th Century who just doesn't "get it", why the New Testament is so profound a document-- because Christians believe it to be true.
Irritatingly, Wood would try to con Bloom into making "theological" assertions, even when the thought-content of these theological assertions is entirely negative. If Bloom asserts that the New Testament is not up to the standard of the Old, this must mean only that, for him, the Old Testament is truth (a wildly unfounded interpretation of the equivocal statement 'Torah "IS God"') and that Jesus is thus not the Messiah. This, for Wood, is a "theological belief", one that Bloom won't own up to, and thus Bloom has failed to own up to doing theology. Has Wood never opened Spinoza's "Theologico-Political Tractatus", from which all higher criticism springs? For there the non-theistic pantheist Spinoza argues that the New Testament is simply a different kind of animal, full of homilies and moralizing and not much in the way of miracles. These seemingly simply insights (which I do no justice to here) are what so many alleged "liberal theologians" still cannot get their heads around, or at least cannot confront honestly. How many Biblical scholars happy to rationalize away the Creation, the Flood, the Exodus rambling and whatnot, freeze up over the question of the resurrection of Jesus? If global flooding and seven-day creations go against the scientific record, how about victims of crucifixtion returning to life? Is the New, Christian Testament to be free from the scientific criticisms offered of the Old? Are the miracles of the New Testament more sacrosanct than those of Judaism? Wood insinuates that the New Testament writings were created with "the conviction" that "they were bearing witness, that they were reporting a historical occurrence", whereas the Pentateuch is "a blend of Mesopotamian mythology and Semitic history", "much of that history closer to epic narrative than to historical record". All this bears the stain of a double-standard. Anyone familiar with the record of miracles in the "Civitas Dei", or the Book of Legends or, for that matter, anyone not disposed by upbringing or proselytizing to lend credence to the miracles of Mohammed, knows how little science or "history" can do to lend credibility, let alone provide outright evidence, for the theological assertions that underpin Christianity. If Tacitus was entirely mistaken about the character of Tiberius, how much should we trust so unscientific an historian as Paul or "John"? But for Wood, Bloom's cardinal sin is not to take the Christian's Jesus seriously enough. One can hardly assent to Wood's insinuation that Bloom doesn't take Jesus seriously at all; hasn't he seen him compare Mark's Jesus to HAMLET?!? Gods man, don't you know what praise that is!? When Wood descends to accusing Bloom of "blasphemous ambling", he's lost all dignity, and properly speaking should send his credentials to the House of Buckley. It's for the scribes of the "National Review" to charge with blasphemy a man who never claimed to believe. The atheist or aesthete has a complete right to abstain from being treated as a pretend-member of any faith or sect they choose to joust with. Being a non-believer is not meant as some sneaky way to affirm believers in the seriousness of "belief".

The Moderate cannot hold

2006-04-26T18:36:00.000-04:00

As "The West Wing" slouches towards its inevitable extinction, one must ask with dreary liturgical repetitiveness, "Why, oh why must it pretend to expect so much suspense on the part of the viewer over the lining up of a fictional Cabinet for an Administration whose fictional adventures will never be aired?" Or does NBC really expect that Americans will hit the streets demanding MORE of President(-Elect) Smitts and more, please more Josh Bolton-- er, whatshisface? Dear gods, Americans don't care who the REAL White House Chief-of-Staff is! Nor do Americans care who the real Rob Lowe is, Republican or jailbait-chaser or whatnot. Every preview of the April 23rd installment was thus an insult to the American electorate, and we should demand that the damned thing be killed off before Alan Alda can accept a Kerry-McCain Vice Presidency.
But there is more to the matter. In a vein which Aaron Sorkin would almost certainly not explore, we received a spirited defense of America's fundamental "centrism" which Josh and Smitts must carefully defend against the demands of radical "liberals" as well as fence-sitting "Republican moderates." Thus two of the most well-bred urban (well, DC) legends of today are feed. Not that I deny the existence of airily disconnected leftists who still thump Marx (or rather, some glossy pink post-feminist tome parading something or other completely disconnected from any legitimate question of political economy as "Marxism"); I have known them, I have loathed them, I have battled them too. These people are called "academics", and they are a woeful bunch, and they have absolutely no influence over Events at all. Thirty-seven years after Lyndon Johnson vacated the White House, does anyone even remember what a "liberal" is? This great nation endured them, their warmongering and all, and prospered. Hmm. And yet these slimmed-down Carter/Clinton liberals, who hardly dare to ask for a few more hospitals in exchange for a few fewer Stryker vehicles (or could we bargain for some handmedown BMD-2s from Russia instead?), no, just maybe perhaps no more tax cuts for the millionaires, not just right now please, and can we balance that budget?-- these Jacobin terrors are set to ruin everything, as always; but meanwhile, if we can whip those good old Republican moderates off the bench, we can have us a great government for sure!
Sadly, moderate Republicans are something of a Bigfoot right now, though reports of a couple of wild wooly females of that variety in the woods of Maine have gained credence. The real problem here is that, once again, mere moderatism, that unwholesome milk of electoral politics thrust into the mewling throats of registered infants, is the substitute for fortifying centrism. A centrist, in my view, is a person of convictions, either of the liberal or conservative persuasions, who assumes the responsibilities of office with a determination to make intelligent compromises which will promise not simply compromise for compromise's sake, but actual positive PROGRESS. The politics of the late Sharon government and of Ehud Ohlmert exemplify this tendency, and in light of the definition I set forth it is perhaps not so surprising that, sadly (and I do not know how) Ohlmert's sweep proved to be underwhelming. Vigorous programs do provoke suspicion as well as outright opposition, and so it should not shock us that Israeli voters had last-moment second thoughts about moving "Forward". But I still often ruminate on the Israeli teen who offered her enthusiastic support for Ohlmert by saying Kadima "is the sanest party-- it's right in the center!" She's right. And the center is the coolest place to be.

"As You Like It" Day

2006-04-13T19:59:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was-- well, not National Reading Day exactly, apparently, but someone declared a do some reading day (apparently outloud to your kids) and for my part I read "As You Like It". This most joyous of comedies naturally makes those times spent in reading it joyous themselves, though perhaps the thrill of discovery having first been met in 6th grade I may be forgiven for having turned my attentions today to two of Bacon's political essays, "Of Empire" and "Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates." But one should not flee the vernal byways of the Forest of Arden in haste, and I have been careful to return to pay further respects to Rosalind (particularly in Act 3 sc. 2 and Act 4 sc. 1) and her company, as well as to reread Susan Snyder's essay on the play at the back of the Folger edition. Despite a willingness to overplay the egalitarianism of Arden to the point of apparently denying Rosalind's own rhetorical triumphs (according to Snyder there are just no winners and no losers-- perhaps she too is a traveler?), she generally does justice to the play, and even sensibly echoes some of Camille Paglia's concerns about endless role-playing as a potential deadend. But then-- and also like Camille-- she has a rather exaggerated account, in my view, of how many compromises the post-Arden world will impose upon our heroine. But won't Duke Senior's new court be a rather jolly place? I can see it all, rooms of white and pale blue, hung with fully-clothed pastoral scenes like those Viennese Rococo paintings that adorned my childhood Mozart cassettes from Allegro. After all, Celia and Rosalind weren't having so dark a time of it there until Frederick sent them packing, and now he is gone, gone quite from the world in fact, there should be nothing to darken anyone's brow.

And so I don't fear for Rosalind's compromised female integrity-- why on earth would it be compromised?-- but I do wonder at Jacques' parting shots. It's as if, in cinematic terms, we pulled back at the close, our minueting marrieds (excuse my 18th Century anachronisms) frolicking in the depth of the frame while we huddle with Duke Senior and Jacques in the foreground. Jacques is no Malvolio, of course, plotting any sort of offstage mischief (I doubt Malvolio's potency to accomplish any, which is why I rather wonder that so many seem to feel that "Twelth Night" leaves such a dark shadow), but one may wonder why Shakespeare feels the urge to highlight his desire to continue his philosophic quest from the peripheries, substituting the once-disenfranchised Duke Senior in his pastoral idyll with the now-resigned usurper Frederick, who presumably will become some sort of Charles V-style holy man-- we might hope, one more holy and less inclined to wish for his old prerogatives. As Bacon says at the beginning of the essay "Of Empire", in a proposition I have previously applied to the postcurtain Prospero, "It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire, and many things to fear; and yet that commonly is the case of kings." So that he who has reached the pinnacle of his worldly fortune "falleth out of his own favor, and is not the thing he was." To what then does Jacques lead us?-- a pleasant "nook merely monastic", or a change of direction for the dramatist himself, as if to say, "Now I put my frolics behind me and take up the dark and mystic path that leads through Elsinore, past the cliffs of Dover and the tawny Nile, to the drowned book and Prosper's isle." Is Jacques a stand-in for Shakespeare, inventor of the human, preparing to interrogate the melancholy Dane, Iago and Edmund, Prospero and Perdita, turning his stage from breezy wood to blasted heath?

Rebecca West might lead us to ponder just what has been lost, that Shakespeare never again was so purely joyful a writer. If only "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is comparable in its sweetness (and even there we have more shadows, more overt unpleasantness), should we be willing to ask Shakespeare for more comedy, less tragedy? But be that as it may, let us forever stand at the side of Rosalind, who delights us with the picture of all that is best in us, commingling as only she can a vernal freshness that is enduring, a talent for androgeny that is rare, and an idyllic backdrop that is sheer fantasy made real. Giddiness is no alien to High Art, or High Thought, though few pedagogues and fewer sorts in the street will allow it, and Rosalind's musical wit, ever flowing and ever golden, and in concert with her merry and melancholy assortment of companions, offers us a literary concerto grosso whose irridescence will never pale, as long as we have ears to hear it.

Coming to Amsterdam, Going to America

2006-04-09T15:51:00.000-04:00

As an opening salvo, allow me to pass on my delayed "hurrahs" for the mighty Dutch Republic, which has created an informational video as required viewing for new immigrants, showcasing such features of the liberaltarian Netherlands' modern life as a topless sunbathing female and two men smooching in the park. Are they targeting Muslim immigrants? Well, unless they're expecting an influx of new citizens from Kentucky, then, yes. The Dutch have been here before, after all; when the Hugenots deluged the Netherlands after the French ran them out, one of their first orders of business was to pressure the state to crack down on Catholics. Having borne with the mob lynching of the De Witts and now the murder of Theo Van Gogh, this small but proud country which was unquestionably the first European state to incarnate the ideals of Enlightenment, and which, with its harboring of Descartes and Spinoza in addition to the great cultural legacy of its Rembrandt and Vermeer may fairly claim to be a modern Athens in terms of the quality and fecundity of the intellectual achievement it has bequeathed to all modernity, is entirely right to insist upon newcomers adapting to what is not only a tradition but a rational and immutable ideal of tolerance and freedom there. After all, Spinoza explored at considerable length the issue of making ourselves reasonably conformable to the needs of our community-- of living as rational beings in a rational community-- and immigrants of faith, Islamic or otherwise, must understand that along with a freedom of personal metaphysical exploration and expression comes a duty to mend the sails of faith in order to leave all other citizens (family very much included) to make their own explorations and to express their answers and questions openly. The individual cannot make of himself a state within the state by virtue of his faith, nor can he be allowed to encourage the obeisance of his family to such a rule. The Dutch government is both right and completely within its rights to take steps to assure its continued freedoms, and I applaud the new effort.
In terms of our own American immigration debate, I offer simply this: whatever the pragmatic or moral outcomes of one policy or another (and I incline to believe that the McCain-Kennedy bill offered a reasonable course of action to deal with the problems at hand) let us not obscure the issue by forgetting that sovereign states certainly are within their rights to police their borders. Whatever my doubts about the motives of some of the fence-lusting Congressmen, I cannot right off a border fence as merely a manifestation of Nativism. Nor can I quite swallow the contradictions embedded in claims that "no American wants these jobs." Are we entirely unselfconscious in this nation of the Work Ethic to say such a thing, and are no conservatives going to jump in and comment on why Americans should hold themselves aloof from such work? More to the point for a liberal, why aren't more voices angrily demanding to know why the conditions involved are so deplorable that no legal citizen would consider such work, or what outrages illegal immigrants may suffer in the course of this labor? And surely even ardent Free Traders should be willing to allow that, where certain conditions depress wages within a country, it is not simply kneejerk interventionism to ask whether such conditions shouldn't be altered.
And frankly, we should not be too indulgent in simplistic, sentimental claims about the work ethic of illegal immigrants doing menial labor. I don't doubt that in fact most of them are diligent and motivated, but such states of character do not necessarily contradict the possibility of violating the law in other ways as well, and with vast influxes of persons roaming about unknown to the law and outside the system, they must inevitably pull certain social problems in their wake. This is not to push for collective punishment-- in fact, it is perhaps the central argument for the McCain/Kennedy approach, and it is one that can, and should, hold the center. But as long as massive illegal immigration continues, there remains a necessary problem (and, by definition, failure) of law enforcement, and with that problem in view I can only maintain that strengthening the security of our Mexican border cannot be a bad thing.

War in a Time of Beach Reading

2006-04-02T21:39:00.000-04:00

Some sad day, when you're poking through David Halberstam's "War in a Time of Peace" for the third round or so, you ask yourself how you can be troubled to believe any given thing you're being told. After all, some fine smart people in Washington were obviously interested in filling Mr. Halberstam's ear with their take on events, events whose momentousness is perhaps overstrained by an author who, despite his subtitle and some spiffy character-sketches of the Bush warriors has precious little interest in the military doings of the George H. W. Bush Administration (one which, one might think, would provide a more fertile ground to pick over than the long slow slog of the Clinton terms) and perhaps in choosing his subject as he does already betrays a certain prejudice. It's easy to enjoy having Bill Cohen shot up; like Bill Frist, he's one of those mannequin-come-morticians of DC whose unstudied grimace betrays a heart full of bile and a head full of bilge. And I won't blame a journalist for falling a little bit in love with Wes Clark; I'm a little in love with Wes Clark too, and if he never runs again and never finds his way into the shoes of Kissinger and Brezinski which he could so capably fill, I'll still have sweet memories of a night spent in front of a Ramada Inn's tv set watching him on C-Span with my honey. Better still, for Clark at least, was that gem of a townhall meeting on C-Span the week before, which I watched with my little cousin in his trailer park bedroom, the both of us eagerly sucking in Clark's Kadima-like centrist wisdom (you just make so much goshdarn sense, Wes!) before the added refinement of the postshow meet-and-greet (cameras still rollin, Wes!) where the General confided in an eager pro-Israeli voter his own Jewish heritage and assured her that, where "Bring it on!" concerns go, he'd be sure to "beat the sh*t out of" that George W. Bush.
But Halberstam, just as bad as Woodward, has rolled up his history-as-it-flies wrap with just the scraps of anecdote and insight that appeal to him-- appeal to his "literary" or "psychological" instincts as much as, or rather quite more than, any prejudicial political inclinations. But Pulitzers be damned, so many of these choice tidbits are worthless simplifications, so many fussy little 'that's when I knew that Sandy Berger was on board'isms, that it's hard not to want to throttle Halberstam for even publishing them. Just look at his coverage of Clinton's little Putting Green Day spazfest and ask yourself, Why, as an author, does Halberstam even bother to show up? If you couldn't authenticate one good line of Clintonian cussing, or invent one even, you're just embarassing yourself to even mention it. Look at "Dutch: A Memoir" and ask yourself, what have you given your readers? Essentially, a six-hundred page weekend editorial score-settler; and it is sufficient testimony to the flimsiness of the endeavor that, giving himself a couple of hours to pour through it, the reader realizes what a light tome it is. That Penguin Lives tract on George H.W. Bush feels like the "Iliad" by comparison. --But sincerely, I did love the Larry Eagleburger sketch. Secretary Eagleburger should be the model civil servant for us all.

Freud and Frears, masters of psychology

2006-03-19T14:48:00.000-05:00

If you were a Freudian psychoanalyst, sure, I'd tell you your central arguments are circular. But since Americans are such a bunch of naive empiricists I'll tell thee, Newsweek, nobody's silly "brain-imaging" and "rigorous testing" is ever going to confirm or deny Freud's teachings, or those of anyone else profound enough to see deeper into the psyche than a bunch of Prozac-dispensing professional optimists are willing to do. America is overrun with M. Homais-types who will never admit that life is terribly difficult, n'est-ce pas? and have enough respect for it to leave it at that. Or at least leave it chemically unaltered! Every parent and educator rushing off to douse their kid with Ritalin or Prozac is as much an accomplice to the culture of pot and Ecstasy as the covers of "Shape" and "Fitness" are to the cult of anorexia. Don't just blame Kate Moss here! No human being needs, or should want "abs of steel"-- they're unnatural, not to mention unsightly-- and the cause of "health" can breed a diseased aesthetic, and in short, disease itself, just as effectively and blamefully as the cokehead proselityzers of chic in the fashion rags.
Thursday was my first viewing of the "Dangerous Liaisons" dvd, another much-delayed first, since all previous video releases of the film (and, it has been alleged, the initial theatrical-run print itself, though I cannot confirm this from memory) have been quite awfully transfered, despite Warner Bros.' consideration in letterboxing the film from the very first. All the more considerate when we note that it is filmed in the divine 1.66:1 ratio that rules in European art house cinema. The print is not quite pristine, as is evidenced in the very first shot; but it is a great personal relief to enjoy the film without the washed-out inkiness of its previous home-viewing incarnations.
It's painful to reflect upon how what once held one's attention in ravishment now displeases, perhaps even bores a little. The opening scene between Merteuil and Valmont-- the wager-- opened new vistas for me as an adolescent, and through years of repeated watching I hung on its every word as desperately as the later, autobiographical sequence in which Merteuil elucidates her life philosophy. Today this godless bantering has an unpleasant, obvious odor to it-- it's better than Neil LaBute but it has the same unattractiveness to it. Nor can I quite admire the cadences of Hampton's dialogue here. From the getgo, that: "So, my dear, how are you adapting to the outside world?" --"Very well, I think." has a trite ring to it. I find that, contrary to many critics who were led to think Jean-Claude Carriere's "Valmont" dialogue fit for the mall, the "Valmont" screenplay allows Bening and Firth not only more natural, but more genuinely aristocratic cadences. But this is something that comes and goes in the Frears' film. When Merteuil''s voice lowers itself to penetrate Valmont's ear with the glad tidings "She's a rosebud" I can only exclaim to myself "Well of course!!" Sixteen-years old and in that Gothic convent, what the devil else would she be? -- And whyever did Stuart Craig select such a dank hole for Cecile's convent anyway? Are we in "The Castle of Otranto"? The Cecile story is handled badly throughout; even the moral dread I once felt during her "date rape" can hardly be mustered on account of Uma Thurman's (forgive me!) dreadful performance-- her dreadful presence I should even say, for whatever she's supposed to be it isn't believable. Even as a willing and debauched nymph for Valmont's continued plundering she feels like she belongs in a different movie, a different century very like. I won't venture to hazard whether Hampton adapts Valmont's story of an assignation with Mme. de Volanges (in the novel, revealed to be an outright lie) in order to insinuate that Valmont is debauching his own daughter, or at least leaving himself open to the possibility in a cavalier way (and why bother leaving in Cecile's miscarriage and his hopes of begetting Bastead's heir-- and why the devil "Bastead" anyway instead of "Gercourt"?). Nor for that matter will I get into the politics of "rape" vs. "date rape"-- heavens help us, Cecile's deflowerment plays like rape though her after-report (as well as her sudden decision that she rather likes Valmont's 'caresses') would tell the Camille Paglias of the world that this sinister Don Juan won his dreadful spoils fair-and-square-- assuming, that is, that the poor girl was actually "doing" anything wilfully in the midst of a series of interlocutions that were hardly merely Socratic in tone.
The strength of "Dangerous Liaisons" is thus uneven but surprising; as David Ansen blurbs it, what shocks is the force of passion that finally oozes from the film's "cold marble heart." There's a curious mix of artifice and its denial all throughout the film. Consider the notoriously jarring sound mix, with its pianoforte dynamics, all bangs and whimpers (I'd hire the whole team in a heartbeat if I were helming a picture). Though the surfaces are, of course, elegant enough, Philippe Rousselot's lighting is resolutely unglamorous, particularly in the tight midshots and close-ups of the film. The martial scabbrousness of Glenn Close's rouged lips is never softened and the rooms themselves appear throughout a bit "under the weather." At times the film looks almost like a cross between "Cries and Whispers" and the Godfather films, as in the pivotal scene, where that famous aria from Handel's "Xerxes" is sung and Valmont swings permanently out of Merteuil's orbit and into Tourvel's. Rousselot never lit a scene in "Interview with the Vampire" with such deathly pallor; you'd almost think they were trying to hide some anachronism sunk in the shadows, perhaps a wall of stereo speakers some playboy heir had installed to turn the salon into a disco. And somehow the novel's August-to-December timeline, apparently held to in the snowy denouement, doesn't intrude upon the film's exteriors in so much as the slightest hint of autumn color. That, it appears, would have been too "vital"-looking in a film depending upon a very stylized wanness.
As it is, that lack of exterior richness can become dreafully annoying. The confrontations in the park between Valmont and Tourvel are all powerful, and the green verdour, very occasionally dappled with a little pallid sunshine, serves as an effective backdrop, unobtrusive yet enveloping. But the "village" scene, where Valmont executes his policy of "charity", sticks out like a sore thumb, and is as ugly-looking as anything in Mann's "Last of the Mohicans". Frears' camera should never have risen upon this scene; that elusive intrusion of the crane makes it look all the more stagey and fake; that thatched hut belongs on a stage, not a film set. The shot that precedes the cut to the Gluck opera, with Mme. de Rosamunde's entourage strolling homeward from the Sabbath service, gives us the film's only moment of sensing a larger civilization in the ancien regime than the Sadean sodality the story bears down upon: it's a flash of Gainsborough in a moving series of Aubrey Beardsley's.
But I'm overstating it just a bit. It's a gorgeous treat to behold the frosty glade blues of Merteuil's upholstery, and then another treat to see the same blue trimming on a couch at Mme. de Volanges'. Valmont's home, when we finally get a glimpse inside of it, gives us a sense of the man of science, the philosophe, that Valmont could have been and, truthfully enough, probably is (the telescope in his bedroom is a nice touch. Does he pattern his sexual geometries upon those of the stars?). Most importantly, one notices how, in the Tourvel-dominated second half, strong pools of light begin to intrude in seemingly meaningful ways. By the time Valmont spurns her, in a scene of titanic raw emotive power, the bulbs of hearty white wanness sprinkled upon her walls and caressing her furniture feel like the invisible presence of a remote, sorrowful Pascalian god (note how "Christian Thoughts, Volume II" is the only overt literary presence in the entire movie). Well before this point, the film is sunk in blues: when Valmont has pity on Tourvel in her moment of weakness; while Azalon scopes out Merteuil's residence; and crucial confrontations have all begun to take place at night (Tourvel consulting with Mme. de Rosamunde; Valmont's final seduction of Tourvel; Merteuil's "beyond my control" instructions). Even the daylit scenes seem to take place in late afternoon, and one notes the crackling fireplace when Merteuil receives him.
Michelle Pfeiffer, always wan in her late 80s period (remember that intrusive cold sore in "The Witches of Eastwick"?) is at her very best here, and along with the pallor one may note how closely her facial structure actually makes her resemble the bonneted girls in many Fragonard pastoral scenes. As she yields herself up to Valmon't undressing in that unconsummated seduction scene, the raw pinkness of her ear and face, Malkovich's Orson Welles-like hovering over her, that exquisite intimate darkling blueishness surrounding-- it couldn't be more vivid or more perfect. Mostly throughout, and especially where it matters most, Frears and Rousselot create a riviting visual environment for these damning encounters, and I did not err too badly in my youth in taking this film for the ne plus ultra in cinematic treatments of passion.
Most importantly of all, "Dangerous Liaisons" served for several years as my standin whenever Paglia discussed Bergmann's "Persona" and its treatment of the human face, in all its varieties of expression and expressionlessness. The film is certainly an entry in that visual genre Sven Nykvist describes as "two faces and a teacup" cinema. The three principals, in their facial aggressions, aversions, and improvisations deliver a rich performance of these emotive registers. Watch how Valmont invades Tourvel's visual space as he paces behind her in the gardens, intruding over one shoulder and now another, or how the film cuts from him taking his seat beside her, up to the two of them in close midshot, and then up close with his face hovering at hers, telling her "All I want is to be . . ." Watch that silvery glisten in Merteuil's eyes, the light of intelligence become a quicksilver sharkiness, almost sickly, as she narrates her philosophical conversion: "I was fifteen when I came out into society. . . ." And in the mesmerizing final shot, as Glenn Close's face geologically morphs from Arctic glacier into volcanic plane, and then darkens and hardens into a lunar hemisphere as all light dissolves away into an incomprehensible blackness, we behold something fully as iconic and as psychologically absolute as the spliced Andersson/Ullman image in "Persona."
This demon without her masks, is she a mirror held up to our face?

Tom Bonaparte; Paradise "Lost"

2006-03-16T21:15:00.002-05:00

Here's a thought: how about Tom Cruise hits up Ridley Scott to direct him in an adaptation of Stanley Kubrick's "Napoleon" script with the diminutive one as The Diminutive One? Minus the glaring eyes of Jack Nicholson staring into the icy infinity of the Overlook's snowshrouded grounds, lusting for blood (and that could've been Nicholson in '75 staring across the field at Eylau or into the fires of Smolensk) who better to inject a little "vive l'Empereur" into the freedom-fried American moviegoer than the sharkish Cruise? He and Napoleon share a certain rationalizing ideology, the wolfish charisma, the stature and the lack thereof, perhaps the baggage too; and since Cruise could adapt Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" (to paraphrase David Thomson on George Lucas long ago) if he wanted to, and since he's in with the two directors (Scott and Michael Mann) who have been namedropped for such an undertaking, the man and the script might have met. Of course the very fact that we're talking about a Kubrick script in another's hands is far from ideal and, frankly, we may have seen much of its intended visual content and moral thrust in "Barry Lyndon", as perfect a film as one could hope for-- and even Kubrick probably couldn't challenge Abel Gance's precedence with the material. But it's a film idea worth translating into reality, and from beyond the grave Kubrick could help one of these gifted but uneven directors to achieve something permanent. -- No disrespect to Ridley Scott, whose "Alien" and "Blade Runner" are also as perfect as we could hope for; but today that feels like a distant, other Ridley, and his later films, though sometimes distinguished in their own way, are somewhat trifling by comparison (I'll take "1492: Conquest of Paradise" over any film he's made since, and "Gladiator" is just a drag). Michael Mann, also blessed with great cinematic chops, could make something of it but his "Last of the Mohicans" rings so hollow that I fear he could ruin everything.
Cruise should not be handing his fate into the hands of J.J. Abrams, ABC's wunderkind of the Show of the Disappearing Plot ("Lost") and the disappearing show ("Alias"-- can anybody ever be sure at what secure undisclosed timeslot it's been broadcasting for the past four years?). In the recent hiatus from Season Two's unrelenting aimlessness we've been treated to a reminder of how "good" Season One was by comparison! Locke had his prophetic mojo, the gorgeous Cocteau twins Shannon and Boone were making viewers humid, and an audience unexposed to the wondrous continent that is called Tarkovsky were being promised-- promised-- some sort of contact with the numinous. The best they got was that lovely crane shot of Kate in the tree, a sungilded Eve in a darkening garden accompanied by thoughtfully ominous modernist orchestral stylings almost certainly meant to remind us of the 'Jupiter Mission' opening in "2001: A Space Odyssey". Lovely pop eyecandy, but the pop mysteriousness of it all offered quickly vanishing returns. Now that Season Two has dropped my pet "A Planet Called Sheol" interpretation (or would seem to have closed the door, at any rate) Abrams is clearly marking time, and has no incentive to deliver even the kinetic thrills that Jennifer Garner's buttkicking and costume-changing once yielded. The flashbacks have devolved from morality plays into Trivial Pursuit, the characters are reduced to the same grubby annoyingness, and that godforsaken Charlie is still alive?! Oi, what about me viewers? Let your remcon be your raft, and let no crusty beardo take it away from you.

Readers-in-Chief

2006-03-13T19:10:00.000-05:00

Imagine opening a volume of critical essays on "The Turn of the Screw" only to find that every single piece says-- I'd rather not say what, rather than even through a hint out to those who haven't read it (and "Lost" fans don't deserve the annotation anyway). Criterion's "Fanny and Alexander" booklet presents much the same unpleasant surprise and, judging from the online samples, the television edit has thrown commentators into a frenzy of reductionism.
At least Rick Moody doesn't write his essay the way he does his fiction. But it's galling to find so many latching onto that chair and furnishing the whole castle-- my enchanted castle which is the movie itself-- in reductive threads. While I'm agnostic enough to admit, for instance, that Harriet Anderson most likely did not call upon her sisters as she waited to rot away into the Beyond (it was only a fantasy/parable in Anna's imagination, true with the clearer truth of dreams, an "it is so, so it should be enacted so"-- "most likely" . . . ), I don't take that to be often the case in "Fanny and Alexander", and Bergmann always leaves his book wide open.
Yes, I'm still shuddering from its sublimities, even with that hyperrigor of exquisite dreams. But all that must wait, for one viewing does not make a man rich in argument, or at least not exhaustive, which is what all good diatribes must be.

This will not be a good one. My quote for the day was fished from last week's "US News" during those last-few-hours-before-the-post-brings-the-new-one crammathon (I want to milk my subscription for what it's worth). Here's Random House vice-president for 'new media' Keith Titan on today's reading habits: "People are reading more than ever-- screen-based reading, on mobile phone, BlackBerrys, computer screens, reading blogs, and gathering information on the Web." I'll just throw that last little cherry on top into the back of the freezer till I'm ready to hang the NCTE and its fellow-travelers out to dry for their particular brand of mental masturbation (yes yes, "gathering"!, veritably harvesting all that goodness, all that good information on the Web, good people go, go gather ye your information on the Web! The Web, yes!! . . . ). People are reading more than ever, reading menus, bumper stickers on the backs of cars, they're reading billboards, and church bulletins, and the dirty words tattooed on the backsides of the lay-of-the-night, they're gathering information from their digital watches. Random House, are you paying this putz well to put out these blurbs? Ah, then it's a gift . . . .
This put me in mind of a passage from John Podhoretz's memoir of the Bush pere White House, "Hell of a Ride". He writes: "The only book anybody thinks he read during his four years in office was Tom Clancy's novel about the drug war, and there's no evidence he finished it. . . . Given his thirty thousand handwritten notes, it's entirely possible Bush wrote more than he ever read." [229]
This is not entirely true, as the rumor was afloat in '92 that G. H. W. Bush was curling up with McCullough's Truman tome, though in Monica Crowley's "Nixon Off the Record" RN comments, "Now please. Bush is not really a reader, especially during the convention!" [108]. But it got me to thinking about frivolous communication, both the reading and writing of trivia, data, and all the yes/no/maybe-we'll-have-lunch crap that Random House perhaps considers to be marketable today.
More interestingly, it got me to thinking about Presidential reading habits, or their absence rather. Everyone knows presidents are not a well-read bunch. Edmund Morris didn't need to spot-check Reagan to see if he recognized the names of Goethe and Schumann! And yes I know Schumann is a composer, one of my idols in fact, but since I don't recall whether Stendhal or Balzac or Turgenev or Tasso or whoever actually made Morris' list whenever the quiz was administered, I won't put names in his mouth. Even Paul Johnson is down with the fact that the thinkers who made Thatcher a Thatcherite were quite off the radar of Ronald Reagan. And if Nixon listened to "Kreisleriana" or (as Stone's film would have it, anachronistically) a Harnoncourt recording of Schubert, or if Clinton could read "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (a work for which he could have little sympathy) should we sleep better knowing that the commander-in-chief is also the Culture Vulture-in-chief?
If anything, it's a shocking relief to see Dallek assure us that young JFK actually broke the spine on a hefty Walter Lippmann volume and half a dozen other serious tomes (though I'm frankly sceptical). An even greater oddity can be found in Carter's Presidential Papers, where he tells us, and the people of India, somewhere, what he has taken from the "Bhagavad-Gita". But can we discover this Dixie Arjuna anywhere within the arc of his Administration? Do Jimmy Carter's explorations of Hindu mysticism show themselves in the face of his policies? He must have found Krishna's wisdom a little sanguine for his taste!
By no means do I intend to endorse the Andrew Sullivan/Peggy Noonan take on the virtues of simpleminded Presidents. Tortured geniuses like LBJ and Nixon, so the argument goes, attract psychoanalytic liberals who are at once free to speculate on the complex inner workings of Presidential paranoia (thus feeling at once companionable-- he's a big neurotic too-- and smugly superior), all the while secretly, masochistically thrilling themselves with awe before these masterful males, whose apocalyptic powers and irrational implacability make them totemic surrogates for the Jehovah they have scorned. This is merely the negative theology of Reaganolatry, which locates its second coming in the second President Bush. Politically, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were surely as much unitary characters, true to their core convictions, as Reagan was; and the human Reagan, while not perhaps so odd as many of his peers, offers room for analysis, while George W. Bush is a Michael Lind screed born to life. More to the point, there is no brownie for being a foursquare character in the White House, any more than there is for mastering the Mortimer Adler library of classics.
Still-- obviously-- some effort should be made, and perhaps it is time the public begins to demand it of its candidates, as it should of its children, and finally of itself. What books should we thrust into the hands of a distracted chief executive? At the moment I fancy the idea of equipping the George H. W. Bush of '92 with Ferrero's "Characters and Events of Roman History", partly because I see something of him in Ferrero's portrayal of Tiberius (not the Saddamite monster of Tacitus' portrait), where he could identify himself in the misunderstood administrator and general, a man of simple virtues and complex skills but little trusted by a frivolous people, or even by the more charismatic predecessor who at once establishes and undercuts him; but more importantly as an examination of the broad sweep of those historical currents Conservatism and Cosmopolitanism, an examination that might have fortified him in standing firm by his martial and diplomatic record, his recognized virtues of experience and prudence, rather than carelessly following down the path cut by the officeless Buchanan. In the portrait of Nero (also more benign than Roman record) he might find comic forebodings of the imperial theatrics of Bill Clinton, and perhaps he might even dream of some Cleopatra of the East who would welcome and establish him as a new Antony when his people have discarded him. Didn't Bush once compare himself to some old gladiator of anecdotal fame? That's a lot of intellectual heft for a thin little book, and if I were ever fortunate enough to meet him, I'd press it into his aged hand. And perhaps Dr. Spock's baby book too.

Getting Down to Life's business

2006-03-12T19:05:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was my first screening of the 5 hr 13mins. full-length Swedish television cut of "Fanny and Alexander."
Now, this is the greatest film of all time-- the theatrical 3 hour version which I first viewed some ten years ago had already established that and, if you choose to consider it as a separate entity, it can still hold the second position comfortably even against the likes of Tarkovski's "Sacrifice" or "Shadow of a Doubt"-- but the full, preferred cut loomed in my dreams as the ultimate cinematic dream castle, unapproachably remote as "Fanny and Alexander" had to wait for Criterion to be released on dvd at all. But ads in "Sight & Sound" tantalized me, and the critics, though not all the directors, were careful to clarify with a parenthetical "full-length television version" when they offered it on their lists for the once-each-ten-years Poll. Frightening insinuations reached my ears (were our protagonists really the children of the Bishop?), but all in all the five-hour "Fanny and Alexander" remained almost as mythical as the Christine Edzard "As You Like It" (even now only attested to by a S&S ad from years ago . . . ), though longed-for even beyond the five-hour Viscontis or the missing footage from the 'restored' "Novecento" broadcast on Bravo, shorn of all sexuality and none of its necktwisting violence in 1992.
I had my vhs to console me, an MGM/UA video transfered more or less to the standard of the HBO home video of "Amadeus" which I grew up with (perhaps less, though). Even so, it's not a film to be viewed lightly; like Mahler, it doesn't wear for everyday. So I had almost certainly viewed it under a dozen times when Criterion finally unveiled its sets: the theatrical cut on one, and another, omnibus set pairing that with the definitive cut. Europe got it first, but it had finally arrived.
But of course I shamefully put it off, like so many other things. But when my gf announced she would be out of town for Saturday, I committed myself, commited the sixty-odd dollars and committed myself, absolutely, to watching it. At this juncture, it's all a matter of courage, a courage I less and less frequently have. An "Elle" contributor once proclaimed that she had sat through Bertolucci's "1900" (the aforementioned "Novecento") three times back-to-back in the theatre in 1975; today, she admitted, she wouldn't be able to get through it once. Granted, in 1975 she had little over four hours to exalt in, but I share her sense of loss, even perhaps a bit of her relief. But that I shall now dutifully shun.
Oh, but not to the point of watching "Fanny and Alexander" tomorrow. Goddess knows when that'll happen. But in the theatre of my mind it's playing nonstop. The night before I actually dreamed of "Novecento", a film whose ideological excesses threaten to become dehumanizing even as its cinematic arias swirl and soar to astounding emotive heights, and I was in raptures, in that waking bliss of dream I feel when I dream of Italian films, or when I channelsurf and alight upon a moment of "Once Upon a Time in the West", which I have still never seen!; oh, and that promised bliss was mine in "Fanny and Alexander", an experience big enough to remind me of Plato's arguments for the immortality of the soul and to console me, perhaps, if they cannot be true. So giant and entire a fragment of the human imagination must surely "endure" for, Realist that I am, I cannot believe that even the concept of such an achievement can be without its universal resonance, should every material trace of it somehow vanish.
But it has not vanished. Hell, the discs didn't even skip! And, long life permitting, I shall wander attentive and enraptured in my enchanted castle many times to come. Brevity of life, sense, and senses notwithstanding, someone else will, and there is a patience in that thought which itself builds to mystical rapture inside me.