Lally's Alley

THE ARTIST

2012-01-29T09:39:00.002-05:00

I have friends who weren't as crazy about this film as some critics and audiences are, and obviously the Oscar voters too, since it's nominated for best picture. Even French friends (one of the silent movie era aspects of the making of THE ARTIST is that it stars a French movie star, Jean Dujardinm unknown here, and is made by the French filmmaker, Michel Hazanavicius, who wrote and directed it, but it transcends the limitations of foreign films because it's silent, reflecting the universality of all films in the silent era).

I chose to see it with friends in a movie theater even though I received a disc for awards consideration. It seemed that to give it a fair shot it needed to be seen in a setting similar to the only way a movie could be seen back in the day when the movie is set, the end of the 1920s and early 1930s when the transition from silent movies to sound ones occurred.

Some critics have noted that there's a lot of nostalgia in several of the nominees this year, ala Woody Allen's MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (my favorite movie so far I think), especially nostalgia for the old days of movie making, ala THE ARTIST and HUGO.

But it isn't just nostalgia. Not to my mind anyway. Sure, during troubled times, a lot of us look back to a perhaps idealized vision of the past for consolation, I certainly do. That's one of the reasons I watch TCM, Turner Classic Movies, so much. But there are plenty of other reasons as well, like the artistry of black and white filmmaking back when, as well as different styles of acting and behaving and costuming and speaking and much more.

THE ARTIST pays homage to all of that in ways I found actually equally original and contemporary as nostalgic and classic. There are references to many genres of film from the past and from iconic films themselves, such as SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, A STAR IS BORN, CITIZEN CANE, LOST WEEKEND, and tons more. In fact, I found almost every scene had a reference oblique or direct to a great and sometimes not great film from the past.

But there are also elements of filmmaking and film acting and film editing and directing that seemed original and/or reflective of more contemporary techniques and styles, including the use of sound in a dream sequence and the emotional veracity and non-exploitative aspects of some of the love scenes.

At any rate, I left the theater as elated and delighted and satisfied by the movie experience as I've been by any film this year, including MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, though I left that film in love with love and THE ARTIST in love with Berenice Bejo, the female star and main revelation of this film, along with her leading man and the one who carries the film and makes its conceit succeed, Jean Dujardin.

There are better known American movie actors in smaller parts who shine as well—John Goodman, Penelope Ann Miller, James Cromwell—but the movie depends on the two stars' performances working as both an homage to old style silent film acting as well as to contemporary taste in film acting and they pull it off perfectly for my taste.

But I recommend seeing it in a theater while that's still possible to get the full impact of THE ARTIST's artistry.

ESKOW NAILS IT

2012-01-28T00:13:00.001-05:00

My friend the writer/musician and Huffington Post blogger R. J. Eskow does what I haven't the energy to lately, nails the last Republican debate candidates to their own petards (whatever that means, I never knew, but I knew what it was meant to mean and so do you, I would guess). And does it with humor, clarity, reason, logic and actual facts (and links to sources). Totally worth reading and using in your arguments with any Republicans you still argue with.

Here.

BURT KIMMELMAN'S THE WAY WE LIVE

2012-01-27T18:02:00.001-05:00

Among the books I'm reading, I just finished poet and friend Burt Kimmelamn's latest, THE WAY WE LIVE. [full and obvious disclosure: Burt did the interview with me that was recently published in Jacket and you can click on to the right] He's a scholar and professor and a close observer of the details of life as he experiences it.

THE WAY WE LIVE is a small collection of poems that capture those details in quietly lyric ways as seemingly ephemeral as the moments they record. But they're deceptively so. In fact, the poet, who grew up in Brooklyn and now lives in Jersey, has a lifetime of experiences that belie the quietude of his poetry. It's like how really tough guys don't have to act tough, or really smart ones don't have to always be showing off their brains, etc.

Here's two examples of the restrained artistry of the poetry in THE WAY WE LIVE:

Domestic

Cutting board, knife, bread
crumbs in dawn light—she
stood and ate beside
the kitchen sink, then
got back into bed.

Alhambra Steps

Leaving the palace
we descend the steep
stone stairs arm in arm—
you pulling me down,
me holding you up.

MY SOMETIMES MISDIRECTED BUT ALMOST ALWAYS COOL PRESIDENT

2012-01-26T11:18:00.001-05:00

I figured everybody had seen this by now. but in case you haven't:

[PS: I love that little humble tilt of the head at the end, it articulates a lot people miss about this guy as a person, not politician.]

MONEYBALL

2012-01-25T23:47:00.002-05:00

Okay, so I really need a break from all the politics I've been obsessed with on here lately even though in my real life I always find room for poetry (read some every night) and all the books stacked next to my bed, and music and always movies.

I haven't been posting about some great old movies I've been watching on the usual cable channels, TCM and Retroplex (or whatever it's called) etc. But I also have to catch up on all the discs I've been sent for the movie awards season that I haven't really been that into this year. Maybe it's the films, maybe it's me, but it seems like there just wasn't a lot to get crazy excited about.

But I haven't seen some of the ones getting a lot of attention so I started tonight by watching MONEYBALL, the baseball flick that's really not a baseball flick but a statistics and emerging male midlife crisis over missed or blown or confused or misled or...opportunities...flick.

Brad Pitt is getting most of the attention, as well as the movie itself, as important and award worthy. Pitt's always fun to watch, for me, both as a fan of real movie stars and of great movie acting and the combination of the two, which is perhaps rarer than you'd, or I'd, expect.

Pitt often takes chances (one of my favorite risk-taking performances was his secondary role—to Bruce Willis's—in TWELVE MONKEYS, one of my favorite sci fi flicks, a genre I don't have that many favorites in). But this is one of his less risk taking performances. He may be a little too cute, and incredibly well-preserved, for the role in some ways, that can be distracting, as in what's this guy got to complain about etc. But he goes for it, as he always does, and has moments where he nails a guy who can't get over some wrong choices or failures or missed opportunities or blown opportunities, depending on your perspective and the moment.

But the direction and writing don't support the obvious depth of his character's interior struggle, so all Pitt gets to do is throw things and look like he's trying to control himself when he isn't. But he also looks a lot like he doesn't care which doesn't work and isn't probably what he's going for.

The film has moments that got me feeling that great elation inspiring movies about underdogs winning, or going for it, do, but it also had a lot of flat moments where you wanted something, anything, to happen to fill in the lag. In the end, for me, it didn't live up to its potential. Pitt was like the character he played, Billy Beane, who almost did what he intended and wanted to do but just missed.

Jonah Hill has a role almost as big as Pitt's so it seems like it should be almost equally as important. But except for his usual I'm just a self-conscious guy who didn't mean to say/do/etc. that kind of mannerism and line reading, and a few moments that were beautifully realized, his character is basically boring.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman is completely wasted as the coach. He has about two or three scenes with a few lines and the rest no lines, and there's no writing or acting to explain what he's doing in the film to move it along. It seems like there's going to be some sort of dramatic conflict with Pitt's character but...it's more of a whimper than a bang.

And Robin Wright has one scene with a couple of lines. One of our greatest film actresses and that's what she gets to do? The girl who plays her character's and Pitt's twelve-year-old daughter, Kerris Dorsey, is terrific, though she isn't really given a lot to work with, and the young actor who plays a catcher turned into a first baseman, Chris Pratt, was a revelation and deserves more recognition.

Another older actor, Vyto Ruginis, was really compelling and so in the moment, any scene he was in came alive in a way the rest of the movie never did. So in the end, it's not a great flick, doesn't deserve any awards unless for the three actors who aren't stars I mention above and even they don't deserve awards but maybe nominations.

But the film, no, shouldn't be nominated for anything in my opinion, nor Pitt's performance, as much as I like watching him. An E for effort for him, but no award or even nomination. there's too many other unrecognized performers who deserve it more this time.

My humble opinion.

STATE OF THE UNION

2012-01-24T23:11:00.001-05:00

Another great speech that challenged the Republicans' lies about our president, but it could have been even tougher and more specific about the accomplishments of this administration and about the lies the right propagates.

He did score a lot of points, though most people weren't watching, and it doesn't matter to the right. Republican leaders sat still while others rose to their feet and cheered about common goals that anybody of any party should share, but they begrudge Obama any bit of respect or credit for all he's done.

Unfortunately so do too many Democrats and independents who have justified criticisms of Obama and/or Dems in Congress, though often a lack of understanding of the obstacles he and they face with the Republican intransigence and intention from Inauguration Day to do everything to discredit Obama and make him fail or appear to be failing.

But as he pointed out, there have been more jobs created in the past two years under Obama than in all the Bush/Cheney years, and our dependence on foreign oil is the lowest it's been in over a decade and has gone down from the highest it's ever been, which was under Bush/Cheney (hmmm...any connection to that fact and their connections to Saudi Arabia et. al.).

Not to mention GM now being the top car company in the world again (beating out Toyota) and Chrysler growing faster the last year than ever and Ford doing great and hundreds of thousands of jobs created as a result and all this from an industry the Republicans were willing to let die and even suggesting it'd be a good thing!

Here's a link to a few other facts that show some of Obama's accomplishments and some of the challenges he still faces.

HAPPY NEW YEAR OF THE (WATER) DRAGON

2012-01-23T19:42:00.001-05:00

And yay Jersey Jynts.

I finally agree with the governor of my state about something, when he pointed out that the so-called New York Giants practice in New Jersey, play in New Jersey and most of the team lives in New Jersey. As he put it, the only thing New York about the team is the NY on their helmets.

As I've said before, I don't follow sports, but I do live in Jersey so basically can't avoid this one.

As for other Chinese New Year's news, did anyone see where Santorum was asked by a woman at a rally a question in which she referred to our president as a "confirmed Muslim" and he didn't correct her? McCain has proven himself to be a hypocrite and worse, but at least he had the sense and courage to tell a woman at one of his rallies when he was running for president that Obama wasn't a Muslim when she made the same charge.

This incessant rightwing propaganda that relies on either outright lying, misinformation, misdirection, or the sin of omission as the priests used to call it, is, to use a Gingrich word, despicable.

Though he used it against the press, but could just as well have used it to describe a lot if not most of his own behavior over the course of his being in the public eye.

Hope the belief that a dragon year is lucky turns out to be true for all of us.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER

2012-01-22T00:10:00.003-05:00

So now we've got Santorum and Romney and Gingrich all winners in the first three Republican primary battles. The famous tradition of the rank and file Republicans falling in line behind the next designated candidate who usually is the one who came in second in the last presidential election primaries has fallen prey to the same dissatisfaction with the status quo that fuels the Occupy movement on the left and the Tea Party on the right.

The problem is the right still mainly frames the public discourse, mostly because they're better at the propaganda game than the left but also because they intimidate the media with phony outrage and self-righteousness ala Gingrich's response to the legitimate question about his having put himself up in public as a spokesman for family values, and headed the movement to impeach Clinton for having an affair with an intern when Newt was doing the same. And the media gets all flustered and self-defensive and forgets to nail him on his hypocrisy!

But it's good news in many ways for Obama. Let the Republican candidates raise questions and doubts and critical perspectives on each other. Obama could just run the ads they created to attack each other. But the president and the Democratic party have got to get better at making the case, based on the facts which are all on their side, that almost everything has improved since Bush/Cheney's last years in office.

But I don't even hear them talking about, let alone crowing about, the fact that GM is once again the number one car company in the world. Something that would not have happened had the government let GM die from the Bush/Cheney Great Recession like the Republican leaders and media mouths wanted to do. You would think with all their chants of USA and "We're number one" in all kinds of areas where we're not anymore thanks to Republican policies, you'd think they'd be happy that we're finally back on top in something. But not if Obama and the democrats had anything to do with it.

And the media plays along and the Dems let them. We need someone who can play hardball with the right like Bill Clinton could.

ETTA JAMES R.I.P.

2012-01-21T00:19:00.001-05:00

I'm sure you've already heard of her passing. Watching the various network and cable news reports with different recordings of hers in the background brought unexpected tears to my eyes, as I emailed an old friend. Though I always dug her, with her passing I realized I didn't understand before how much her voice meant to me and my life.

I never met her or saw her perform in person that I remember (there are periods of my life and various nights that are lost to me so I can never be certain), but her voice is in my heart, and I suspect yours too, forever, or I guess I mean as long as my heart lasts.

PS TO LAST POST

2012-01-20T08:09:00.000-05:00

Another lie continually propagated by the right including the deleted one exposed here.

A DISGRACE

2012-01-20T00:02:00.002-05:00

The applause lines in the Republican debate tonight were a disgrace. From all four candidates left.Ron Paul is the least offensive in terms of attacks on Obama, his attacks are spread around somewhat. But the other three, Romney, Gingrich and Santorum are a total disgrace to our country and everything it stands for when they attack Obama as someone who actually is out to put more people on welfare and actually prevent people from working. Bad enough the accuse him of wanting to turn the country into something "they"—the implication being white rightwing Republicans—don't recognize, but blaming the economic crisis and unemployment on the president and never mentioned Bush/Cheney and their rightwing Republican forebears!

This month's number for those applying for unemployment is the lowest it's been since BEFORE BUSH/CHENEY'S last year in office! In almost every statistic that counts things are better than they were when Obama took office. But these fear mongering traitorous miscreants can't talk straight about any of it.
Just blame Obama and make promises they won't keep like no Republican president has since Nixon (he was going to end the Vietnam War in 1968, six years later it ended when we lost, Reagan was going to make the government smaller as were Bush/Cheney but they grew the federal government more than any recent presidencies, while Clinton actually cut the size of the federal government and Obama has on a smaller level and has announce policies to cut more.

Et-endlessly-cetera. I know, I shouldn't have watched it. My blood pressure and all.

[PS: I corrected typos last night but obviously was tired and upset to have left in so many other mistakes, including spacing etc. But I'll leave as is, since it represents a true mini-if-late-night-rant.]

ANOTHER GREAT QUOTE

2012-01-18T22:37:00.001-05:00

Also from that TIME article on Warren Buffet. This time from William Jennings Bryan [and making the perfect argument against "trickle down" economics which hasn't worked]:

"If you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it."

PS TO LAST POST & ANOTHER RELEVANT QUOTE

2012-01-17T09:31:00.000-05:00

Forgot to add that when Mitch McConnell, the top Senate Republican, said if Buffet wanted to give more money to the government he could write a check and send it in, Buffett challenged back by offering to match all Republican Congressional contributions to the government and to match McConnell's three to one!

He says he's not worrying about having to write any checks in this challenge. So far, of course, he's quite right. And here's another great quote from Buffet:

"I find the argument that we need lower taxes to create more jobs mystifying, because we've had the lowest taxes in this decade and about the worst job creation ever."

WWWBD?

2012-01-16T23:59:00.000-05:00

If you haven't seen it, the article on Warren Buffet in the latest TIME (Jan.23rd issue) makes me want him to run for president. From the little I knew about him, and certainly from his support for raising taxes on the wealthiest because he realized he was paying less in taxes percentage wise than people who worked for him including his secretary, I liked what he seemed to stand for.

But I like him even more now. The way he handles his private life, the way he handles his wealth, and the way he sees the problems in our country and the solutions. There's a short list in a sidebar of some of the things he advocates that the magazine titles "What Would Warren Do?" (in this post's title I added his last name initial too):

Don't lower corporate taxes (he says "The idea that American business is at a disadvantage against the rest of the world because of high corporate taxes is baloney.")

Levy higher taxes on the rich (he says he'd like to see folks who earn their money through investing pay more than those who earn it through their labor, couldn't agree more even though I have some close friends who earn their ducats through investing)

No foreign-profit repatriation (totally)

Curb speculative gains (he calls the idea that you can hold a stock for 10 seconds and have 60% of your gains taxed as "long term" "nuts")

Get tough on directors (forfeit five years' pay if their firms have to be bailed out etc.)

Get rid of private schools (they say he's not totally serious about this idea but feels if rich people had to send their kids to public schools they'd invest in them)

Reform healthcare (he calls the healthcare situation in the U.S. "a tapeworm" that hurts competitiveness much more than taxes)

He's an interesting man with interesting ideas and the article is well worth reading (you have to be a subscriber to read it on line).

MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY QUOTE

2012-01-15T23:04:00.000-05:00

"It may be true that the law can't change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless." —Martin Luther King Jr.

A CONTEMPORARY QUANDRY

2012-01-15T00:21:00.001-05:00

My fourteen-year-old had some friends over tonight. We have limited space in our apartment and the writing I was doing was not going so well with the racket of their talking and joking and watching YouTube videos they found hysterical.

So I went and turned the TV on and ended up switching channels between the Broncos/Patriots game, the Miss America contest and ADAM'S RIB. I don't watch sports much anymore, hardly at all. But when a post season game offers up the kind of drama that matches the Patriots' star quarterback who throws perfectly against the Broncos quarterback who throws poorly but has managed to make it this far with last minute "miracles" as many of his fans see it that help his team with unexpected come from behind wins in the last quarter or in overtime. Well, seemed like it might be an interesting thing to witness.

I don't watch beauty pageants anymore either, but there it was trying to present itself as all contemporary and almost post-feminist, while still being the same old campy throwdown of lockjawed smiles and tearful finale. Well, it seemed worth a look.

And Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in ADAM'S RIB, well, I can always watch them.

And in the end, it was ADAM'S RIB that seemed more relevant to these times and its challenges, as well as more watchable and more satisfying. The game was a a fiasco. Tom Brady threw mostly straight and true and broke a record for most touchdown passes thrown in the first half of a post season game, or something like that, as the announcers tried to make football fans statistic freaks like their baseball counterparts. It was actually embarrassing. The Broncos seemed to fall apart almost immediately, and Tebow's miraculous last minute save was nowhere in sight. So for all his fundamentalist Christian followers does this mean God wanted the Patriots to humiliate the Broncos and Tebow, who flaunts his religion in ways that the Gospels he touts actually discourage?

As for Miss America, I could think of many women of all ages, in fact a lot of them women I know well, who are more lovely to look at, more naturally beautiful and poised and intelligent and accomplished. And I bet any of us could find a young woman in our own communities more beautiful more accomplished more etc. Though it wasn't their faults. Some of them were obviously working very hard to try and achieve this goal presented as somehow a giant accomplishment though in the end it seemed totally arbitrary and totally canned.

The little of it I watched was embarrassing too. The answers to the judges questions, the few I caught, were better than the old days, thank God, and the questions more relevant and challenging, but the "swimsuit" display, which the announcer tried to foist off as a competition for health or something, made me feel so bad for these women traipsing across a stage in bikinis, that for the most part weren't very flattering, I went back to ADAM'S RIB and watched some real women—Hepburn and Judy Holiday, as well as many of the minor characters—represent something much more worthy of crowning with accolades.

Weird night. But at least we won't have to read and hear about Tebow until next Fall.

QUOTE FOR A LIFETIME

2012-01-13T23:55:00.001-05:00

"Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough." —William Saroyan (preface to THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE)

HMMMMMM...

2012-01-12T23:14:00.002-05:00

Did you notice that Haley Barbour the Mississippi governor getting flack for pardoning murderers and rapists and worse en masse was immediately hired to earn millions as a lobbyist for corporations to get government help to them make their gazillions etc. The old revolving door. For more on that door see Matt Taibbi's latest in Rolling Stone here.

LIES & ALIBIS

2012-01-11T23:48:00.001-05:00

I've been seeing a lot of movies on cable recently, like in the last year, that I never heard of and star people I don't really know but have lots of great actors I do know in smaller roles and look as cheaply shot and with pretty flimsy plots as a slightly more expensive porn movie, only the porn is usually overly graphic violence.

I've written about a few and there's many I don't think I have, like BOONDOCK SAINTS and its sequel that is almost a parody of what it might mean to be Irish and Catholic and be hit men. But tonight to take a break from the political news and the writing project I'm working on, I turned on the tube and the only movie just starting (yeah I'm so last decade not streaming over the net but enjoying the randomness of just watching what's on one of the zillion channels now available) was called LIES & ALIBIS (yeah the titles aren't very original either) starring Steve Coogan and Rebecca Romijn who really did seem like actors in a soft porn flick (not that I'd know but I did have friends in L.A. who worked on them or in them) but there was John Leguizamo and Debi Mazar and Sam Elliot and Henry Rollins and James Brolin and Sharon Lawrence all of whose work I admire, and a lot of actors like I used to be where you think you've seen that face before but don't know where.

And I ended up getting into it and watching it to a pretty satisfying end, because it was better written (by Noah Hawley) than most of these B movies or straight-to-video movies or whatever they're called these days. The plot actually kept me guessing a little and interested to see how it worked out and Coogan, who I definitely recognized but didn't remember from where, had a kind of underplayed charm that read as almost comic charisma like a cross between the young Dudley Moore and a B movie Cary Grant but not as handsome.

Well, that's the way I'm feeling after just watching it anyway. The good news is the violence was minimally graphic as it was more about the plot twists of a big con than the usual revenge stuff these films thrive on.

Of course the plot was completely contrived and over the top, nonetheless it was fun and easy to watch with a late night tired brain.

HERE WE GO

2012-01-10T22:31:00.000-05:00

So Romney "made history" by being the first non-incumbent Republican running for president to win both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Looks like the nomination is his.

His victory speech tonight was actually pretty well written and delivered. If he can keep that up he'll be a more formidable challenger to Obama than maybe some pundits on the the Democratic side might have thought.

But it's so dismaying to hear the horrible rhetoric, even if it's a smart strategy for beating the president. Because it's based on the same old rightwing Republican lies and misinformation and misdirection.

Did anyone notice the news that the American automobile industry had a terrific year? The best since the before Bush/Cheney Great Recession began. And the rightwing Republicans were against bailing out the car companies. They would have let all those jobs disappear into some other country!

Obama's made mistakes, and continues to, but he's also done things no Republican would ever do these days, like at least put some limits on insurance companies and help out at least some working people (not to mention getting Osama Bin Laden and keeping a few other promises Bush/Cheney had eight years to fulfill but failed to).

It's gonna be a bumpy ride.

DANGEROUS METHOD

2012-01-09T22:38:00.003-05:00

I watched this film with some friends in the movie business a while ago and was afraid while I was watching it that they would see it as too talky, and the performances as too much, especially Keira Knightley's. I was uneasy because while a part of my brain initially feared I might feel the same way, my heart was touched and my brain soon followed.

In the end I thought it was one of the best movies I've seen in a while and so did my friends, with outstanding performances from everyone. Knightley plays an historically important patient of Carl Jung in the early stages of his development as one of the key figures in the transformation of psychology, the other being Freud of course. It's a tour de force performance, extremely brave and original.

I've been reading and hearing about Michael Fassbender, who grew up in Ireland the son of a German immigrant father and Irish mother. Mostly it's been about his looks as well as his acting. But I've only seen him as Bobby Sands in HUNGER, the unique study of the Irish hero who took his opposition of the English control of Northern Ireland to the extreme of fasting to his death in protest for not being treated as a political prisoner. That was almost a silent movie, as my friend Terence pointed out. At any rate in that film it wasn't about his looks.

Neither is it in DANGEROUS METHOD, though his eyes do mesmerize and are stunningly intense. But he plays the younger Jung as a tightly contained if brilliant intellectual mostly, and it worked for me completely.

Then there's Viggo Mortensen, another actor often noted for his hunkiness as well as his acting. He so loses himself in the role of Freud that it took me a moment of seeing him on screen before I remembered it was him. His performance, as Fassbender's, is mostly understated, though I could see some critics resisting and seeing it as too much of a caricature. Not me.

The secondary players were all terrific too. Vincant Cassel as a famous early influence on Jung and the lovely Sarah Gadon as Jung's wife. Hers is a literally beautifully controlled performance I thought.

Adapted into a play from a book by John Kerr, then turned into a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, it takes a lot of liberties with private moments between these characters we can't know that explicitly, even with contemporary notes and case studies and letters etc.

But it does it in ways I found intellectually and even morally challenging and I suspect much as it must have been at the time, and some of us have experienced in our own transformative times like the 1960s. Mostly it's just a compelling story of intensely smart and original people trying to work through their own issues while creating a whole new way to view some very important human challenges.

I highly recommend it.

Oh, and one of the most surprising things about this movie is it was directed by David Cronenberg, the last director I would have thought of if I hadn't seen the credits before I watched it. It is, after all, a gorgeously shot costume drama, a period piece that has elements of melodrama but is based on real people and history. Amazing.

I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU...

2012-01-09T08:25:00.004-05:00

...but I'm finding it hard to keep up with all the stuff coming at me. Some of it of my own making.

I know there's a calendar on my computer that I could write things in instead of using The New Yorker desk calendars I've been using for years. And maybe if I did keep a calendar of impending deadlines and meetings and events etc. I'd feel less harried.

But I have the sense it was easier in the old days when I just stuck a flyer or postcard announcement on the refrigerator and threw them away (or saved them for the overflowing archive I've yet to try selling though I've had offers from university libraries to take it for free).

Sometimes I feel like just emailing everyone in my email address book that I'm sorry if I didn't respond to a request or invitation or just keep up the e mail correspondence because, whether it's age or the brain surgery or the times, I just got overwhelmed by too many things to deal with that way.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, just explaining. I'm grateful that people want me to write recommendations or blurbs for their books or read their books or listen to their CDs and respond to email updates and exchanges of personal news or edit their manuscript or etc.

But I just forget. The way the emails disappear from the screen once the next several hours worth appears makes it difficult to go back and find some of them (I know I can do it by approximate date if i can remember when I received it, or by name if I remember who's name the e mail was under).

And now I've added another impediment. I've been posting daily on this blog, sometimes more than once, since I started it, except for when I was in the hospital for the brain surgery. But even after I got out, when typing just a few sentences took hours, I still made an effort to post every day because it made me feel better, gave me a purpose and gave a purpose to my thoughts and opinions and taste and discoveries etc.

But recently I figured out a formula that is helping me focus and organize thousands of pages I've written over the last several years of a seemingly endless memoir about the people I've know in my various "careers" and locations etc. It's an obvious solution that it's taken me decades to discover or rediscover. And it's got me so energized and excited I stay up half the night writing and rewriting in my mind (and as we all know, or at least I do, the writing I do in my mind in bed at night is always much better than anything I come up with at the computer the next day, including this post—I woke up at 4AM and turned the light on a few times to jot notes but basically wrote in my head until the alarm went off to get my fourteen-year-old up for school three hours later).

I don't want to underestimate the real problems people have with real obsessive/compulsive disorder or graphomania, but I do tend to spend a lot of time and energy obsessing over and compulsively writing as I have all my life (twenty-seven published books and tens of thousands of unpublished pages of prose and poetry and more) because it seems to keep the fear and doubt at bay, and usually makes me very happy.

But it has caused trouble over the years, like lack of sleep, or mates not being happy with what they thought of as wasted time of mine when it seemed like I was just sitting around reading or doing nothing but I was actually writing and rewriting in my head, or people, including my kids, who took the look on my face for anger when it was really just me working over a sentence or line in my mind and the concentration (some would say distraction) made me furrow my brows and look all upset with something.

I wouldn't trade my life for anyone else's though, nor my obsession with writing, mine or others (I've been known to be such a print junkie I've read about everywhere possible including years ago I'm sorry to say while driving!). I felt at 5:15AM like writing something like this after my son left for school so I did.

TONIGHT'S REPUBLICAN DEBATE

2012-01-08T00:01:00.003-05:00

I know, I'm a glutton for punishment. I did have to turn to another channel now and then when the blowhard jive became too unbearable.

But now and then one of them would actually say something true to score on another and if you were listening carefully and had the capacity to actually hear without the echo chamber of rightwing propaganda and media incompetence, they sometimes ended up defending Obama's policies and presidency, without intending to of course.

Like the drumbeat that Obama's new proposal for a leaner more efficient military in which costs were commensurate with national needs, Ron Paul pointed out it was actually just a call to stop defense department increases. And when Rick Perry suggested sending our troops back to Iraq (!) because Iran was taking over Gingrich pointed out that the smarter thing would be to change the leadership in Iran and then went on to say that if you wanted to stop Wahabanism and not have to cow tow to Saudi Arabia anymore we needed to be free of the burden of depending on them for their oil.

And there was more. But the disheartening thing about the debate as always, was the way the moderators, in this case Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopolous, and a third guy whose name I forgot, allowed the candidates to say one untrue thing after another about Obama or themselves or our government, without challenging their facts or calling them on their lies. They seemed more interested in getting them to admit they'd said the nasty things they'd said about their opponents, which for the most part, of course, the avoided admitting.

All in all I wished I'd watched a movie instead. But what can I say, election year debates are to me like what sporting events are to most men, compelling drama in which I feel I have a personal stake.

GUY BENNETT'S SELF-EVIDENT POEMS

2012-01-06T19:57:00.001-05:00

Time to for a poetry break. Nothing makes me feel more optimistic and grateful and even joyful than a unique work of art, or as unique as anything created by humans can get. I receive all kinds of books in the mail these days, and have on and off for decades. And I'm always delighted to be surprised by something unexpected.

That's Guy Bennet's SELF-EVIDENT POEMS. A Christmas gift from the great poet and writer and songwriter and Irish musician Terence Winch, I read it in only a few sittings. But even before I opened it I dug it. It's from Otis Books/Seismicity Editions and has the plain design their known for, but this one is especially appealing from the cover and text paper to the typeface.

It immediately became a book I wanted to keep around for a long time just to be able to pick it up and look at it let alone read it. But then there are the poems themselves, all conceived from the same inspiration. Poems that are self evident.

You'd think it would become a gag and grow weary but it doesn't. In fact I anticipated with glee every new poem I read just to see how Bennett was going to ring a new nuance or entirely different perspective out of basically the same device and I was never disappointed. Not easy to say about any collection of anything.

I'm sure it's not for everyone's taste, but it sure is for mine. I'll leave you with a few examples, but don't let them deceive you, the variations Bennett manages to create will surprise you:

Preliminary Poem

This poem is self-contained
and self-sufficient.
It does not require critical commentary
or explanations of any kind
to convey its meaning,
which is self-evident.

It does not exceed a single page,
and is thus appropriate
for publication in magazines
and anthologies.

It can be read in a single sitting,
and will not unduly tax the reader or listener
as it neither necessitates nor benefits from
excessive post-reading reflexion.

Short Poem

This poem
is particularly concise.

Unfinished Poem

You

WHAT THE RIGHT HATH WROUGHT

2012-01-05T08:44:00.000-05:00

As evidenced in this headline: "Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe."

We already know our health is worse despite our spending twice as much on supposed healthcare (more like health insurance and medical corporations' profits) and our educational system worse (not because of teachers unions but because in those other advanced democracies teaching is a profession on a level with other professions like doctors and lawyers and paid and respected as such) and so much more, but especially that our economic inequality—the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us—is greater, actually more in line with the worst undeveloped countries (many of the developing ones are now doing better than us in this area as well).

This can all be traced back to the Reagan years and his administration's policies and the rise of the right in the Republican Party.

If only the Democrats would use these facts in a simple and coherent and unified way to gain control of Congress so they can finally reverse these trends.

(And yes, the Dems are partly to blame as well for caving in and going along when the rightwing Republicans gain power and if I had my way Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would be president and have their own party and candidates for Congress, but peace of mind and heart in my experience comes from accepting reality as it is in the moment even when working to change it, as I hope I always am.)

PS TO LAST POST

2012-01-04T22:54:00.000-05:00

Watched a lot of the fallout and analyses from the Iowa caucuses today and this evening and happy Bachmann won't be part of the main story now. But I have to admit, despite the outsized influence money has always had on our elections, maybe never more so than now since the Supreme Court decided corporations are people and money is speech, but nonetheless, I love watching our democracy work during election years even despite the distortions and lying and gaming and framing and overwhelming power of big bucks and their corporate resources etc.

I mean how much fun is it to see Gingrich complain because Romney has used the rightwing dominated Supreme Court decision that allows the wealthy to create commercials supporting their candidate and/or attacking other candidates without disclosing who put the money up. Can you imagine Gingrich complaining about someone else's lies and attacks?! The big self-centered baby is back.

And Santorum posing as an everyman when he supports banning all forms of contraception and outlawing "sodomy" and thus returning to the good old days when you could be imprisoned for having any kind of sex Santorum and his ilk don't sanction! Good lord, what a show this is and will continue to be until November.

IOWA CAUCUSES

2012-01-04T00:22:00.001-05:00

I ran for office in Iowa in 1968 when I was a graduate student in the Writers Workshop at the university there. It was on The Peace and Freedom ticket and the office was sheriff. I came in second. Not bad in a county that was considered Wallace country (George Wallace that is).

So in presidential election years, as silly as it is that such a small state, in terms of population, should be the first to winnow out some winners and losers in a presidential primary, I still get totally fascinated with the results there. Which at ten after midnight are still unclear in terms of first and second place as Santorum and Romney remain neck and neck.

But what was and is most distasteful in this particular race is the way these Republican candidates talk about our president and about "taking our country back from Obama." They just don't seem to understand our Constitution and democratic system at all.

This country elected Obama to be our president for four years. That's the way our democracy works. And this country is all of ours, not just white Midwesterners. No one took our country away from Republicans and rightwingers, because our country never belonged to them exclusively anyway. It's all of ours, and that includes liberals and socialists and anarchists and fundamentalist Christians and atheists and people who support a woman's right to have an abortion and those who only support it when necessary and early in the pregnancy and those who, like most of the candidates in the Republican race for the presidential nomination, believe abortion should be outlawed even in cases of rape and incest.

I am so unbelievably sick of hearing their smug assertions that they are the "real Americans" and it's their country and somehow Obama stole it from them and they have to get it back and all that crap as if we lived in a country where a tiny minority of rightwingers (they've always been a tiny minority and win by dividing their opposition or disheartening them about the process so they don't take part) are the boss of the rest of us.

Well, they can say anything they want, it's a free country still in that arena, but it doesn't make it true. "This land belongs to me and you."

HOW'S THIS FOR NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

2012-01-02T10:32:00.004-05:00

Thanks to the Gunslinger site for this link to Woody Guthrie's New Year's resolutions (not clear what exact year but obviously during WWII).

THE NEW YEAR

2012-01-01T18:01:00.001-05:00

May it be creative and healthy and as happy as possible at whatever stage of life you're at.

I'm looking forward to it. As a political junkie, a presidential election year offers a lot of opportunities for analyses and interpretations. I just hope Obama and the Democrats get a little better at pointing out all the good things they've accomplished and other good things they could have accomplished if they weren't blocked almost every step of the way by rightwing Republicans.

It looks like the race for the Republican presidential nomination might be over relatively early in the year the way the primaries are set up now. But given the volatility of that contest so far, it might drag on which could be fun to watch despite the distressing pile of lies and distortions that have already been promulgated in it so far.

But the good news will always be in the discoveries of new people and the work they're doing that adds something positive to my life and the world.

Like a new friend met recently at the end of 2011 who has written a book, as yet only in e-book form, about her experiences and advice and the experience and advice of other parents involved in either the Occupy Wall Street movement or any kind of political action.

Her name is Kirby Desmarais and her work both as an activist and a writer is inspiring. Check out her book here and if you're a parent it really offers great insights into how to bring your politics into the role of parent and vice versa.

JIM MOTORHEAD SHERWOOD R.I.P.

2011-12-31T00:45:00.000-05:00

One of the seminal figures of 20th Century music, as far as I'm concerned, in one of the seminal bands. Even if I don't listen to them as much as I used to, or their music doesn't lend itself to repeated listens as some other music may, The Mother of Invention, in which Sherwood played a crucial role even before his sax innovations, had an impact on me and many others like no other band of the 1960s and beyond.

They influenced numerous streams of musical genres that followed, and absorbed more musical streams of music that came before them than any other band of what may be in retrospect rock'n'roll's golden age, the 1960s.

Anyway, that's the way I feel right now in the first hour of the last day of 2011. Somehow my hearing of Sherwood's recent passing and registering it here seems like a totally appropriate way to end a very bizarre year full of unexpected events and happenings.

Here's some great footage from a 1968 appearance on the BBC, Sherwood is in the brown suede jacket with the leather fringe first playing baritone sax then tambourine.

{And here's the obit from Rolling Stone.]

WINTER WONDERLAND IN THE BERKSHIRES (NOT)

2011-12-30T00:06:00.000-05:00

Got up here this afternoon, to a snow free holiday vista. On the nearby Butternut snow slopes they're making snow to satisfy the skiers and snowboarders. But it's somehow not the same.

2011 had more catastrophic weather events than anytime in our history so far, eleven.

The last record was nine, in 2009.

There is no doubt that the earth is warming and as a result weather patterns are changing and more severe weather is becoming more frequent.

And the greedheads continue to deny, distort, dissemble and destroy. They have to be brought to justice for their crimes.

50/50

2011-12-28T14:23:00.001-05:00

I caught the trailer for this flick back when it first came out and didn't feel compelled to see it. It looked like another Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen take on the overgrown baby boy whose self-centered crudely childish behavior is forgiven by everyone because...of whatever the plot device is served up, in this case Rogen's friend getting cancer.

Don't get me wrong, I dug a lot of the movies Apatow and Rogen did together, but their routine seemed to become less and less heartwarming and more and more rim shot reflex forced gags. 50/50 isn't directed or written by Apatow or Rogen, and the latter serves in the capacity of sidekick to Robert Gordon-Levitt whose performance alone is worth the price of admission.

Sometimes he's miscast, but when he isn't he's a delight to watch (500 DAYS OF SUMMER for instance). And in 50/50 his performance gets great support from other performances, like Bryce Dallas Howard's (she almost stole THE HELP) and Anna Kendrick's (who kicked butt in UP IN THE AIR). The rest of the supporting cast are terrific too, including Angelica Houston.

And the story isn't as depressing as the premise seems to forewarn. In fact 50/50 is a terrific little movie that I can highly recommend.

PS TO LAST POST

2011-12-27T10:31:00.001-05:00

And just to make the point that this warm Winter weather is not an anomaly, as I wrote in a post a few years ago, when I was a kid living not far from where I live now, the two little shacks next to the pond in the park in my town and next to a sunken field in the park in the town where I live now, were used every winter for iceskaters.

The shacks had fires in their fireplaces or little wood burning or oil stove type heat, for skaters to take a break and get warm. Sometimes they sold hot chocolate. As a teenager I worked either on the frozen pond in our town or on the big sleighriding hill nearby, looking out for people who got hurt etc. I worked every Christmas until I left home, because kids would bring their new skates or sleighs to try out on Christmas day.

When I moved back to this area in 1999, they were still flooding the sunken field in the town I live in now and it froze a few times and people came out to skate. But it didn't last more than a few days a winter, the rest of the time the field was just a big manmade pond with geese and ducks floating in it because they no longer went South for the Winter.

Now they don't bother to flood it anymore, and the pond in the town where I grew up doesn't freeze very often and not for long and not solid enough to warrant allowing sanctioned ice skating, though on the few days it freezes some kids try it anyway.

But the shacks haven't been used in a decade now because it's a waste of money since there isn't any ice skating anymore. This breaks my heart. The idea, as this latest scientific report suggests, that in the future kids growing up in this part of the world, my part of the world, will no longer have white Christmases unless there's a freak storm once a decade or century (which the pre-Halloween one was) and the rest of their winter will be just cool and rainy, sucks.

And the blame is clear, as it has so often been throughout history. Those greedheads who ignore the warnings of scientists and humanists who track and predict the impact of verifiable global warming and instead promote the notion that there is no such thing so that their corporate masters can make even more obscene amounts of money. They suck too.

TWAS THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS AND STILL NO SNOW

2011-12-27T00:09:00.000-05:00

As usual, the rightwingers who are so loud when the winter weather gets cold because their unscientific knee jerk reaction is to declare that a sign that global warming is a hoax have been nowhere to behold or hear during this so far incredibly unseasonable winter.

Spring or Fall like weather every day, with the exception of the freak snowstorm before Halloween (when the right went bananas over how that was clearly proof that there was no such thing as global warming!). It's not only hurting the economy of a lot of the Northeast that depends on ski and snowboard tourism this time of year, but a recent scientific paper declares this is the future, mild winters with the occasional freak storm of greater intensity than normal.

2010 was already the year with the most extreme weather events in our history. More to come. Along with higher than average unseasonal temperatures when the weather isn't just freaking. And the sad thing is, the more this becomes apparent on into the foreseeable future, the right will still find a way to blame it on someone else and claim they were fighting global warming all along (like Ron Paul disowning his own racist and sexist newsletters that he publicly defended when they first came out).

CHRISTMAS DAY TRUCE 1914

2011-12-25T13:53:00.000-05:00

I'm sure most of you know the story, but it's worth being reminded of it again this day. Click here (and read the comments for some further light on the subject).

IN THE SPIRIT OF THE SEASON

2011-12-24T00:11:00.003-05:00

Not to just lay links on ya, though I know everyone's busy this time of year, but here's a great story on Huffington about the cloistered nun who was once the movie star Dolores Hart.

My brother the Franciscan friar who passed a few years ago visited her a couple of times and I think corresponded with her. He and I saw her when she was still a Hollywood actress in the film WHERE THE BOYS ARE at Radio City Music Hall back when it first came out.

He was fascinated when she joined an order of nuns who, well, you can read the story and if you feel so moved send a little donation. Limited as my funds are, I intend to send something.

KRUGMAN NAILS IT AGAIN

2011-12-23T09:53:00.002-05:00

Here.

HOMELAND

2011-12-22T23:42:00.003-05:00

I watched three TV shows this season, all on cable, because they were recommended by friends. I posted already on how cynical their messages and themes and characterizing of life seemed to be.

Well the season has ended for all three and as I mentioned before BOSS and BOARDWALK EMPIRE were almost completely disappointing. Both shows depict not just the world of local politics as corrupt and full of venal dishonorable lying cheating ruthless murderers etc. but are also wildly dishonest. They're like the evening news shows that devote so much to violent crime most viewers constantly overestimate by sometimes over a hundred percent actual crime.

It also becomes, at least for me, totally boring. But I have to admit, the third show, HOMELAND, though also over the top in its basic premise and plot, and thanks to the marvelous Claire Danes, but mostly due to the show by show twists and turns in the subplots, left me wanting more after totally surprising me in the season finale with a story twist I didn't see coming, which is rare these days.

So, I feel I can recommend watching HOMELAND if you haven't checked it out for the compelling portrayal of a mentally ill spy by Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin as her immediate boss and friend, and for the plot twists that although mostly contrived nonetheless keep you guessing in ways that a serial spy drama should.

OCCUPY WALMART!—THIS SAYS IT ALL [AT LEAST ABOUT THE SUPER RICH VS. THE REST OF US]

2011-12-22T08:45:00.000-05:00

If you didn't see it, the other night on the Rachel Maddow show, she had a statistic that was almost incomprehensible it is so unbelievably over the top.

It seems that six members of the Walton family control more wealth than over ninety million of the rest of us.

That's right, six people whose last name happens to be Walton, control more wealth than over 90,000,000 of the rest of us!

That's not only obscene, it also explains why this country has been declining in so many ways, as the result of the economic inequality fostered by corporations, and their apologists, so that this kind of obscene injustice can exist.

Many Walmart workers are unable to support themselves, let alone their families, without taking other jobs or doing without necessities like medical care etc. (there have been numerous news reports of homeless people unable to make enough at their steady job at a Walmart to put a down payment on an apartment!). Not to mention the foreign workers Walmart depends on to keep their prices low enough to put all the mom and pop small businesses out of business in areas where Walmarts take over.

This is what the Occupy movement is about, the anger and frustration over the gross disparity between those who make obscene profits on the backs of workers who make those profits possible.

As my friend Lisa suggested yesterday when I visited a young mother responsible for organizing protesting parents in the Occupy movement, it's time to Occupy Walmart! (And the rest of the places where the most exploitative corporations do their business. And yes, pun intended.)

ANOTHER GREAT POST FOR THE SEASON (FROM TERENCE WINCH THIS TIME)

2011-12-21T17:58:00.000-05:00

You can find it on The Best American Poetry blog here.

PHIL OCHS DOCUMENTARY

2011-12-20T23:13:00.001-05:00

I couldn't figure out a way to embed the five minute excerpt that the DANGEROUS MINDS blog ran to commemorate the late great Phil Ochs birthday. So click here and you'll find it. Even if you don't know who he was or weren't a fan of his music, as I certainly was, I bet if you watch this five minute excerpt from the film you won't be able to not feel the weight of his loss, way too young and too tragically.

JUST A FEW QUICK THOUGHTS

2011-12-20T00:14:00.001-05:00

It's not the saddest thing in the world, but it's up there pretty near the top, watching all the footage from North Korea and the ways in which so many of that populace have been infantilized by their "leader(s)" and system's totalitarian control of media, education, culture etc.

Then thinking of the other national leader whose death just occurred, Vaclav Havel (who I actually got to portray in a TV commercial for Amnesty International if I remember correctly, where they needed someone, whose face wouldn't be lit or shown, to begin in a prison cell and walk haltingly as chains are removed and the gait got stronger and more free before walking out into the light where it switched to a shot of Havel coming out from the dark onto a balcony to cheering crowds).

What an example of what can be so great about humans, as opposed to the selfish little baby rulers like North Korea's.

And the third death in the news of Christopher Hitchens who seemed to have been almost proud of drinking and smoking himself to death (at least the way I saw it portrayed in most of the news stories I saw, if not overtly than implied) and I heard over-the-top praise about from those in the publishing and writing industries who profit from that kind of self caricature if the public buys it and are also suckers for the kind of brit accent he had buying into a kind of superior intellect and knowledge just because of that.

From what I heard and observed, he seemed like a pretty nice guy who lucked into a persona that made him more money than most writers. But from my perspective he was nowhere near as great a writer as his eulogists made him out to be (I had trouble finishing several articles and essays of his because his reasoning would become too easily refutable, including a lot of his rant on Mother Theresa, the kind of thing his persona was born to do to gain attention and sales etc.).

Like I said, he seemed personally like a decent guy with a decent intellect and writing skills who I am sorry passed too young. But he also seemed to me to be a prisoner of an image he felt he had to live up to even if it killed him.

PROMISE KEPT

2011-12-18T23:40:00.002-05:00

The last base has closed, the last troop departed, promise kept.

Obama may not be doing everything I'd like him to, but certainly the first reason he said he was running for president, to end the war in Iraq, he has made good on.

I know, I know, there are still plenty of nonmilitary U. S. government agents of one kind or another still in Iraq, including I'm sure secret agents. But the military presence and the bases are gone, and that's more than we can say for Japan and Germany after over half a century.

Credit where credit is due. And like Robert has commented, hopefully the money saved from the end of this military presence in Iraq will be used for health and education and infrastructure etc. right here in the USA.

Now if we can get them to close down some bases elsewhere around the world...

FRACKING ANYONE?

2011-12-17T13:17:00.002-05:00

On November 5th, you may recall, the largest earthquake in Oklahoma's history occurred just 30 miles East of Oklahoma City.

Oklahoma is a hotspot for fracking (hydraulic fracturing to recover oil in shale formations miles deep).

Oklahoma experienced between two and six earthquakes a year between 1972 and 2008, before fracking.

In 2010, after fracking, it experienced one thousand and forty-seven!

[Read more at Reader Supported News where I got this information from.]

A LAST MINUTE XMAS GIFT SUGGESTION(S)

2011-12-16T23:39:00.000-05:00

If you're anything like me, you either haven't even started your Christmas shopping yet, or have barely begun.

If so, this is going to seem a little self serving, but I swear I'm thinking more of the independent record label and book publishers by offering, I hope humbly, the suggestion that you go to the photos of my last CD and the selection of a few of my books to the right and click on them to find how to order one of them as a gift, for someone who doesn't mind X-rated poetry and prose.

There are some real bargains, like the CD LOST ANGELS (which can also be downloaded from iTunes) or the long political poem written for a reading on the eve of our invasion of Iraq MARCH 18, 2003. Each of these is available for only ten dollars from the label and the publisher respectively.

The larger Black Sparrow collections of prose and poetry found in the American Book Award winner IT'S NOT NOSTALGIA, and IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE, can be bought from the publisher at a higher price in hardback, or in paper (although one may only be available in hardback now) but can also be found new on other sites, including Amazon I think.

Another award winner that's inexpensive (and garnered some of my best reviews) and available from the publisher is CANT BE WRONG, and probably can be found for even less elsewhere on the web.

Okay, last time I do that (until next year).

QUOTE FOR THE TIMES

2011-12-15T21:42:00.000-05:00

"Capitalism must be holy because religion is a business." —Carl Andre

HMMMM.....

2011-12-15T00:13:00.000-05:00

I didn't get a post up before midnight because I was having trouble with my computer, which is three years old and these are the last few weeks when I can still call up for free technical help. Thank that's a coincidence.

I've also been getting calls from a man with a heavy Indian or Pakistani accent making it difficult to understand what he's saying, but it sounds basically like he's saying he's calling from Mircosoft because they've discovered a virus I have in my computer and he wants me to start my computer and do things I can't because I have a Mac and I don't use windows. Fortunately the last time he called I was on the house phone with my older son Miles and he heard what the guy was telling me and told me not to do it and he googled Microsoft and they specifically say they do not call up to tell you you have a virus so it's a scam etc.

All that came up for I.D. on my phone screen was a single digit number which already made it suspicious and weird, like so much else these days.

This internet connected life is so totally different from not that long ago that when I watch movies from the nineties even, but especially the eighties, they seem like totally ancient history in terms of technology. No laptops or iPads or iPhone or iPods or etc.

I did just catch a good bit of PULP FICTION which I hadn't seen in a long time and noticed two women I went out with back in my Hollywood years had small roles I'd forgotten about. Maybe life was always weird.

BOARDWALK EMPIRE

2011-12-13T23:44:00.001-05:00

Well, I stuck with it for two seasons and feel cheated. Some good acting, though even Steve Buscemi has had his moments of wtf acting. Some great costumes and sets and camera work etc. But the story line became more and more preposterous. Something out of exploitation movieland, like I can't come up with a reason for drama so let's kill someone.

I've already posted about the cynical outlook on life and humanity the show portrays, but the saddest thing about it is all the over the top too violent for Greek drama scene ravaging comes from the made up parts. If Scorcese and the rest had had the courage to stick to the real stories of the characters based on real people it would have been a much more interesting look at boss-style politics in the 1920s (in this case Republican) as well as race and religion and ethnicity and Prohibition with perhaps some relevant lessons for our own times.

But they took the easy way out and went for the blood and distortions of what actually was truly interesting and dramatic history. Where are the insights into our history through realistic drama when we need them?

THE SAD IMPACT OF RIGHTWING PROPAGANDA

2011-12-12T23:26:00.004-05:00

I was at this place where I did some physical rehab once and the owner lets me use it to work out. He keeps the TV on CNN for me with subtitles, but with the sound off for everyone else. The radio's playing Christmas songs and there's a survivor kind of camaraderie. Not too many people who look like me, a diverse group of many shades and accents, though the dominant one is working class Jersey.

There's immigrants and injured cops and firemen and retirees and the occasional young athlete. Some are regulars and friends, but as I'm doing my routine a woman I hadn't seen before, a big beefy middle aged lady sitting up on a therapy table with one of those electric stimulator machines soothing her injury, looks at the TV and says:

"Oh Jesus no, every time that man opens his mouth the stock market goes down."

I look to see who she's talking about and there's our president standing at a podium speaking. I can't make out the words so don't know what it is but can't help saying, "That's not true."

"Oh yes it is," she says, "they said it on the TV" and I already knew she meant Fox News.

There were a few more exchanges as I tried to enlighten her, pointing out the fact that the stock market was plunging off the deep end when he got elected and under him it's turned around, mentioning the success of the auto bailout with Chrysler paying back their loan six years ahead of time with interest, and the rest.

But she wasn't having any of it. When it looked like I might be more prepared to defend my position with facts, she said we shouldn't talk politics. So I stopped.

Later in the day when I got home, I turned on the news and there was the same shot of our president speaking at the podium and what he was saying when she made her misinformed and, unknowingly or not, lying accusation about the president, was that the war in Iraq is over. A war generated and supported by the last president and his party's lies, a war whose price tag contributed mightily to our debt and the economic catastrophe they created.

I guess that's what you call ironic. But I'm sure she wouldn't have any of that either.

JENNIFER DISKIN R.I.P.

2011-12-11T21:04:00.007-05:00

Jennifer was a wonderful poet whose work I loved and died way too young. But she physically suffered for years and is now at peace.

I wrote a post on her work and her book that I was going to link to, but decided to just reproduce the most important parts here:

A fellow poet gave me Diskin's collection of poems, WEAR WHITE AND GRIEVE, because she wanted to turn me on to her work, and it succeeded. Diskin lives in Scranton and writes a kind of personal narrative poetry that a lot of poets do but is surprisingly difficult to make work. To create something unique in this form isn't easy or all that common. But she manages to do it.

Partially that's because her perspective feels unique when you read her, and partially I suspect it's because her frame of reference is a bit unique (quick, how many Scranton poets can you name, though in fact there's a thriving poetry scene there, as there is almost anywhere these days despite the general media tendency to ignore that reality) and partially because of her passion for poetry.

A great example of that is her author's note on the back which includes this: "She can't get enough of poetry, friends, Billie Holiday, and reading, reading, reading. She loves poems and would marry one if he were available."

You can see from that how already she's telling her story differently and yet completely accessibly. And it's no coincidence that Billie Holiday is on her list of what she can't get enough of. Like Holiday, Diskin's voice is original and plaintive in its own way, and equally as resilient and almost ironic in the face of disappointment and tragedy.

A lot of Diskin's poems in this collection are too long to quote in their entirety—like the knockout opening "Electric City"—and not all are about the trials she has faced that her poems are specific about in details but not in over all analysis (I'm assuming she suffers from some form of cancer and is still a fairly young woman), but here's one that gives a taste of her skill and clarity:

BONE MARROW BLUE

The doctor prepares my hip.

I've taken my Atvian.

I lay on my back.

There is no Barry Manilow Mandy

piped into the oncologist's office.

I lay on my back

and listen.

He tells me

my marrow will travel to New York City

to be studied.

Numbing takes a long time, then

the dull kiss into the bone.

As he pulls the needle through,

he says to the nurse he puts

white lights on his Christmas tree.

You read Newsweek in the waiting room.

Even when you hold my hand,

I miss touching.

Once the sample is collected,

the ache doesn't stop.

Put your fingers in my side.

My bruise is a blue delphinium

a spring I invent

surreal with snow.

My condolences to her family and friends—and fans, of which I was one.

[PS: Here's a great obituary for Jennifer.]

GAIL COLLINS GETS IT RIGHT SOMETIMES TOO

2011-12-11T00:58:00.002-05:00

This time here.

CREAM DOES NOT NECESSARILY RISE TO THE TOP

2011-12-09T11:17:00.005-05:00

Witness the Republican presidential primary race so far.

This is a premise—that talent will always be recognized and acknowledged etc.—I have taken issue with before, including in the early days of this blog. And anyone who reads this blog now, or just stops in for a visit now and then, knows I often single out books or other works of art and their creators that don't get, or have never gotten, their due.

But I've been noticing that outside of the Republican primary race, this idea has been getting a lot of support lately in the usual places (i.e. publications from The NY Times to literary mags and blogs etc.) and it disappoints me that any experienced and intelligent person with their own strong standards and taste in culture and the arts would ever defend such a blatantly false belief.

Like any film lover, I'm always noticing the minor characters in movies and TV shows I pay any attention to (and even more so after being one of the actors playing those parts) and discovering performances that are as good as any on record.

Some of those actors go on to become stars eventually, but many do not. That isn't because they aren't good enough. Obviously, since in the roles I noticed they were exceptional. It's because of the usual suspects: timing, luck, trends in taste and style and subject matter and types and etc.

For instance, three of the greatest performances by male actors I witnessed on the New York stage in the 1980s showcased the talents of men who became friends of mine for a while back then, when I was beginning a career myself as a professional actor in films and TV.

One of them was James Russo, who went on to a small role in the opening scenes of the giant Eddie Murphy movie hit BEVERLY HILLS COP. And had an equally small role recently in the opening scenes of the not as successful PUBLIC ENEMIES.

I saw him play the lead and only male role in the play EXTREMITIES, and his performance left me in awe of his talent and theatrical charisma. No way, I thought, this guy isn't going to become a major motion picture star, even if it's just playing bad guys.

Another one of the three I remember was Richard Cox who was one of the tiny ensemble that did a supposedly bold rendition of RICHARD III (at least that's what my post-op-brain remembers it was) in which the actors were close to naked, just wearing skimpy loincloths and drew a lot of attention because the emerging star William Hurt was one of them.

Hurt seemed totally miscast (as he seemed to be as Byron in the play that began his road to stardom and I saw with a powerful female Hollywood agent who couldn't stop talking about him, despite what I found to be an unimpressive, even bad, performance, though he's done other work I admire) and was horrible in the play, mumbling his lines so that they were mostly inaudible and crouching in positions that seemed to be telegraphing his self-consciousness about his near nudity. Lindsay Crouse was the female lead in that production if I remember correctly and did a pretty good job and was allowed to not be as naked as the men.

But the best thing in the production was Richard Cox's performance. It was revelatory, brought out aspects of his character and the play I'd never noticed before, made it real, anchored the entire production and I heard every word he said and felt its truth.

He had a small role in the notorious film CRUISING, and like Russo has had a career as an actor, but nothing like his talent would seem to predict and call for.

The third was Kevin Kline who I discovered when I took my older brother the priest to a musical—he loved them, and so do I—based on the film ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, which we chose mainly because Imogene Cocoa was in the cast and were blown away by Kline's performance. The physical comedy was demanding and brilliantly done, but so was every other aspect of his performance.

Now, you can argue that Kline's talent was broader and he had the capacity to play a wider range of characters than either Russo or Cox, but so what? Think of all the actors whose talent is narrow and yet achieve stardom. Or you can bring up personal lives or physical quirks or anything else, and I can find someone whose career reached the heights despite similar issues.

I've acted in, and even starred or co-starred in, many films that never even got released! Some of them because they weren't very good (but think of all the films that do get released but aren't any good) yet others were fine. I can think of many movies I've seen at screenings or caught before they disappeared that worked perfectly for me and yet disappeared with hardly a trace.

Sometimes there are reasons. Like a film I recommended that was gone within a week of its release it seemed, WHITE IRISH DRINKERS. The performances are outstanding for my taste, and the story compelling, and the young actress lead (the older one is Karen Allen) an unknown who totally enchanted me I'd love to see more of but haven't. But you could argue that the misleading title probably put some people off (I had a play I wrote and directed run in clubs and later a theater in L.A. for several months and saw some of the dialogue ripped off and used in films that came out later but no one seemed interested in taking any further, and it may have been because the title was unprintable in most newspapers and advertisements and unspeakable on radio or TV)

And don't even get me started on books and music and poets and artists etc. Think of people whose work you love and admire who haven't gotten their due. There's of course too many to even number or name or maybe even comprehend. And yet, on TV news and entertainment shows, in magazines and newspapers and on the web, this idea that "cream always rises to the top" still often holds sway.

As a Catholic kid we had an All Saints Day, a day set aside to consider and be grateful for all the saints, not just the ones who had their own individual days and were the stars of sainthood. And we also had an All Souls Day, for the rest of us, or all of us. I like to make some part of every one of my days be about all the creators who put so much into their particular creative works and yet get little or no recognition for themselves or their work, and the same for those who don't create art but contribute to life nonetheless in other, sometimes much more important, ways.

I'll also keep writing about this and trying to bring attention not only to the better known folks making art and contributing to our own and the global culture, but to those you may not be aware of at all.

AND AS FOR NEWT

2011-12-08T18:25:00.001-05:00

Here's the first few paragraphs of Maureen Dowd's column from last Sunday's NY Times:

"Newt Gingrichs's mind is in love with itself.
It has persuaded itself that it is brilliant when it is merely promiscuous. This is not a serious mind. Gingrich is not, to put it mildly, a systematic thinker.
His mind is a jumble, an amateurish mess lacking impulse control. He plays air guitar with ideas, producing air ideas. He ejaculates concepts, notions and theories that are as inconsistent as his behavior.
He didn't get whiplash being a serial adulterer while impeaching another serial adulterer, a lobbyist for Freddie Mac while attacking Freddie Mac, a self-professed fiscal conservative with a whopping Tiffany's credit line, and an anti-Communist Army brat who supported the Vietnam War but dodged it."

So much more could be added, and is, but that about sums it up.

SO WHERE'S THE RIGHT'S CLAIM ON SUPPORTING THE CONSTITUTION...

2011-12-07T10:51:00.003-05:00

,,,when it comes to the postal service. Rightwing Republicans are always going on about the Constitution and The Founding Fathers, but it was the Republicans who semi-privatized the U.S. Postal Service which led, in part, to the situation now, where post offices are closing and hours of delivery being cut back, and other changes for the worse for those who still rely on the mail for many things (i.e. the poor who don't have access to computers and smart phones, and those not-so-poor who haven't succumbed to the Internet's lure).

The U. S. Postal Service was established in the Constitution, one of those very specific articles there, and further honed by The Founding Fathers in the years after that article was ratified. So, in order to provide for the general welfare of all its citizens, the U. S. government should be able to run the Post Office with revenues from taxes as well as postage and other fees. But like the country's railroad system(s), rightwing Republicans have managed to decimate the Postal Service, as well as the rail lines (which can be justified by the Constitution in several ways, but one of them might be the section about "postal roads" being built and maintained, since a lot of mail has always traveled by mail).

And they've done this while subsidizing, with our tax dollars, big banks, oil companies, weapons manufacturers, billionaires, etc. etc. etc. (which is nowhere supported in The Constitution).

But as post offices disappear, and those of us who still use the mail get forced to turn to "for profit" carriers like UPS and FedEx (the U.S. Postal Service was not meant to be "for profit" until the Republicans changed it to a semi-private corporation back in the '70s), rightwing politicians will continue to tout their proprietary claim on The Constitution and The Founding Fathers as if the rest of us can't read or don't bother to, so will never realize what hypocritical liars they can be and often are.

J. EDGAR

2011-12-06T23:54:00.001-05:00

Clint Eastwood has made some great movies, like THE UNFORGIVEN, and some flawed but still good ones, like GRAN TORINO. But for me, J. EDGAR is neither. Don't get me wrong, there's things about this movie that are great, or flawed but still good. There are also things that are pretty weak, even bad, for my taste.

It's way more ambitious than most of his films (except for the two about the battle for Iwo Jima, mini-masterpieces to me), with many more scenes and settings than he usually has in his films. Clint's the master of the minimal, minimal dialogue in the scripts he chooses or cuts that way, minimal gestures as an actor, minimal scenes and camera set ups, even minimal casts. And the music he often composes for his films is minimally intrusive, usually no grand orchestra movie soundtrack overcompensating.

But for J. EDGAR, Eastwood is only minimal in offering any dramatic explanations for why this guy was as creepy as he was and did so much damage to our country during his half century of power. In everything else about the film, Eastwood's maximal. It's a big cast with I would guess more minor roles than almost any of his other movies.

He tries to cover over sixty years in Hoover's life and profession, as well as the contemporaneous history that Hoover's trying to control and does too often. And that presents a problem. I was hired to write a screenplay for Otis Redding's life story back in my Hollywood days, and thought I'd given them a pretty good one, but the studio heads changed by the time I finished it and the new guy wanted it entirely different to put his stamp on it. And then it never got made.

So I know how difficult it is to do a biopic. It starts with the writing, and in this case, Dustin Lance Black, who wrote MILK was the writer, and I wasn't crazy about that sprawling portrait of a man's life either. Both films have some of the same problems: moments of emotional connection, separated by scenes that seem either arbitrary or expository with little or no connection to the rest of the film and its characters (the movie about the great Irish hero, Michael Collins, had the same problem, as do many biopics).

So I wasn't crazy about the story. It depended on many stock bio tricks that I would have liked to have seen Clint resist. Judi Dench does her usual great acting, but in the service of the cliched monster mother, whose scenes with her son seem to be positing that it's all her fault he turned out to be such a cretin.

But at least her character has a clear connection with Leonardo DiCaprio's "J. Edgar" that makes at least cliched sense, unlike Naomi Watts' "Helen Gandy"—Hoover's career long loyal secretary who kept his secrets to the grave. Why she was so attached to him is never evident dramatically, she just is okay?

The standout performance may be Armie Hammer's (he almost stole SOCIAL NETWORK playing two privileged twins) as "Clyde Tolson"—Hoover's loyal second-in-command who shared Hoover's life so completely it has always been assumed they were lovers. The movie is not definitive on that score, though it offers up some contrived, to me, scenes that no one could possibly know about to demonstrate the connection they had. But again with no evident reason for it.

DiCaprio makes his usual strenuous effort to portray the character he's been hired to portray, but as so often happens in his films, at least from my perspective, he's miscast. His face, even when covered with make-up tricks to make him look a little more like Hoover, still betrays that boyish cuteness that makes it pretty impossible for me to buy him as the kind of men who seem to have been born old, like Howard Hughes or J. Edgar Hoover.

And the latter, of course, looked like a miniature bulldog, a very old miniature bulldog. There are other actors who do nice work, my old friend Michael O'Neill as Senator McKellar in a scene where he drills Hoover at a hearing, and Christopher Skyer gets Nixon so right, he should be cast immediately in a movie about maybe our most diabolical president.

As always, the music is one of the best things about the film, and like I said, there's other things to dig about it. But in the end it fudges or skips over some of the worst aspects of Hoover's seemingly endless grip on unelected power, while making the insidiousness of the man seem at times justified or almost sympathetic. But Hoover was a pathetic, hypocritical, lying, chicken-hearted blight on what our democracy aspires to and our Constitution stands for, and though the movie alludes to all that, it seems to be trying to soft sell it, the way I see it.

So, it wasn't the movie I'd like to have seen on this subject. Maybe you'll feel differently.

ANOTHER MUST READ KRUGMAN COLUMN

2011-12-05T22:41:00.000-05:00

He says it better than most of us have: here.

GOTTA SEE THIS

2011-12-05T00:10:00.000-05:00

If you haven't already. I feel like I've seen it before and maybe even posted it. But it's worth seeing again.

PS TO LAST POST (MORE COMIC RELIEF)

2011-12-03T12:04:00.001-05:00

Another hysterical short short film.

Only this one you have to link to and make sure the kids aren't around when you watch it.

And pay attention right from the beginning, that's not a real ad.

[PS: And thanx to my great friend Sue for hipping me to it.]

SOME COMIC RELIEF

2011-12-02T08:52:00.000-05:00

This has got to be one of the silliest Youtube videos yet, and totally fun.

I found it on the Dangerous Minds blog, which my older son, Miles, turned me on to (and I added to the list of recommended blogs and sites on the lower right).

There's more from the group that created it, Punchy Players, including the "Cream of Wheat" Judy and Liza clip that this is a PS to.

THE HELP

2011-12-01T23:21:00.004-05:00

Finally saw this film and can see why it was highly praised and equally strongly criticized.

What's good about it is the story-as-story sucks you in and pays off with some strong emotional satisfaction. It brought tears to my eyes several times, as well as gave me a few laughs. Much of that can be attributed to the acting.

Emma Stone in the starring role has turned into everything Lindsay Lohan's younger years seemed to promise for her career as an adult actor before she got derailed by her problems. Stone has a few repetitive quirks that may become mannered if she keeps them much longer, but they work for her character in THE HELP pretty consistently.

Viola Davis is once again a wonder to behold on screen, as she anchors every character she plays in a reality so tangible you feel like you know her from the moment she first appears on screen, and have known her forever by her last scene.

Octavia Spencer is the revelation of the film, as many critics and audience members have testified to, but so is the always unique embodiment of character that Leslie Jordan brings to a small role that almost steals the movie as the newspaper editor.

Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek and Cicely Tyson do their usual screen magic. Mary Steenburgen does a good job too, though in a role that wastes her talent and screen presence.

But the criticism is correct too, because almost every character is a stereotype, most of them overdone, some of them way overdone, though to perfection, like Jessica Chastain as the newly rich "white trash" wife of the wealthiest male character, or Bryce Dallas Howard as "Hilly" the racist female villain of the book and film.

The author of the book was criticized by many for hiding a not so subtle racism behind the guise of attacking historic racism. Set in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, the story is meant to expose the complexities of relations between well-to-do "white" Southern young wives and their definitely-not-well-to-do and no longer young "black" maid/nannies.

Supporters of the book and movie point to how much of an expose the story is, even if retrospectively, of how hypocritical Southern racism was in family life, particularly in terms of women. It's "a women's movie" in the sense that all the males are secondary or nonexistent characters. The story is as much about "white" racism as about "black" oppression, and the reaction to both by those brave enough to fight it (thus the Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer characters).

Interestingly, most of the criticism has come from African-Americans, including "The Association of Black women Historians." (Here's a blog that delineates some of that criticism, mostly of the book.) The criticism is easily understood, e.g. that the "black" maids speak a distinct dialect from the "white" characters, that "black" husbands are either brutal or long gone, or that this is the perspective of a white author and a white director and misses the more complex realities of that time and place for African-American domestics, as well as letting the white male characters almost completely off the hook for their common sexist as well as racist treatment of their "black" domestics.

But what that criticism misses is that in the movie there are several "good" African-American male characters, either on screen or referred to, and that the "white trash" character is as stereotypical as any of the "black" characters, as are in fact all the female characters who dominate the story.

Having experienced the segregated South at very close range when I was stationed there at the time the movie is set, where I had a relationship with an African-American woman my age (we were both twenty at the time) who had worked as a domestic in a "white" household, I know that the characters in THE HELP are stereotypes, and that the movie obviously whitewashes (literally) the common "white" male boss's inappropriate and sometimes much more than inappropriate racism coupled with sexism toward any "black" female help.

But the movie does get the main emotional and psychological high points correct enough to still make it a good story. And the actors, despite the cliches in their characters as written, make each role so real they transcend the limitations of the writer's easy categorizing.

In other words, it's one of those movies about the South and race that oversimplifies too much and yet manages to also probe some aspects of those subjects that gets at some deeper truths that seem relevant to not just our recent history but our present time. All we have to do is look at the response to our president to see how many still cling to old ideas about race in this country, and have a hard time seeing past it. And I'm not just talking about "white" folks.

[In fact, a movie could be done today about "Mexican" and other "Latin" "help" in restaurants and households etc. not being treated so well either, and stereotypically, etc.]

WOULDN'T IT BE GREAT IF HYPOCRISY WAS A CRIME?

2011-11-30T09:44:00.002-05:00

Then politicians who rave about "the sanctity of marriage" and are found cheating on their spouses could actually be put in jail for a while, or male politicians who push for criminalizing homosexuality and then are caught with their pants down with members of their own gender, could be thrown in a cell.

Or religious authorities or coaches who tell those in their charge they should live up to standards and practices they don't themselves.

No military authority would be allowed to tout their "Christian" credentials and beliefs unless they turned the other cheek and refused to kill anyone. Nor would they be allowed to rant against "socialism" since they and their fellow and sister military folks benefit from the most socialist of institutions, getting free meals and shelter and healthcare etc.

No member of Congress could benefit from anything he or she is attempting to cut spending for the rest of us on. Nor could they accuse their opponents in other parties of anything they too are doing (best example Newt Gingrich impeaching Clinton because of his affair with an intern at the same time he was in a marriage while Newt was having an affair with an intern at the same time he was in a marriage, etc.).

Man, this is a list that has the potential of actually truly being endless.

Of course, I've been guilty of hypocrisy too, but wouldn't mind being held accountable on the petty levels I've engaged in if those at the top who literally sometimes get away with murder while condemning others for that were held accountable.

I can dream can't I?

[Another example is my not being allowed to tout my once encyclopedic memory anymore, since I could have sworn I wrote a post yesterday but discovered this morning I had only thought about it, so any impatience with anyone over their forgetting something is a bit hypocritical of me, ain't it?)

ALBERT NOBBS

2011-11-28T22:31:00.001-05:00

The other night, up in The Berkshires, I got to watch on a really big wall-mounted flat-screen TV a movie that's being touted for various awards, especially for Best Actress for Glenn Close—ALBERT NOBBS.

Based on a novel set in Dublin at the very start of the 20th Century, it's about gender bending out of economic and personal necessity. It's an intellectually stimulating premise and raises a lot of deep questions about not just historic perceptions and presumptions about gender and gender roles, but also about personal fulfillment in general.

There are certainly some Oscar performances in ALBERT NOBBS, but I'm not so sure one of them is Glen Close's. She does her usual great job, but it's so restrained by her interpretation of the character that it's almost missing at times. And it's definitely her interpretation, because without her the movie would never have been made, plus she co-wrote the screenplay and is one of the producers.

The back story of the movie is that Close has been trying to get it made since the mid-1980s when it was first done as a play. My take is it would have been totally appropriate for her to play the lead in the 1980s, but I'd like to have seen someone younger do it this time, and someone more appropriate for the suspension of belief, though Close certainly does her best, and her best is better than most.

But not as good as one of her co-stars, Janet McTeer, who is on my short list for award season nominations for Best Actress, even though others might see her role as only warranting Best Supporting Actress.

There's a bunch of great acting in this film, but not consistently across the cast. McTeer and the wonderful Mia Wasikowska are at the top of the list. But in smaller roles Brendan Gleeson and Pauline Collins are equally terrific. As, in even smaller roles, are Brenda Fricker and two women I originally discovered in THE COMMITMENTS and are a delight in ALBERT NOBBS—Broangh Gallagher and Maria Doyle Kennedy (just Maria Doyle in THE COMMITMENTS).

But there's also some weak acting, like from the male lead Aaron Johnson, which I blame on the director, Rodrigo Garcia. I watched the film with people connected to movie making and early on one of them pointed out how bad the lighting was in a scene (with no source of the light, making the scene look overlit and way too bright for any emotional impact but also for the time and place) and blamed the director, correctly.

Nonetheless, despite its inconsistent quality, the subject matter is so compelling and some of the performances so brilliant (McTeer's the most), I recommend seeing it.

SPIRIT OF THE HOLIDAY SEASON

2011-11-27T18:04:00.001-05:00

In the latest post from Robert Zuckerman's KINDSIGHT blog (an ongoing continuation of his great book of personal photographic portraits and stories with the same title).

I wanted to just reproduce the post here, but couldn't figure out how to do it, it kept sending just a rectangle with one of those tiny blue question mark rectangles in the middle of it, so you have to click on this link and then click on the post twice to enlarge it to easy reading and viewing.

ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL BERKSHIRES HOLIDAY

2011-11-26T22:22:00.000-05:00

Could it have been more beautiful? Bright blues skies, warm enough to go jacketless, or just wear a sweater. It's interesting that when we had that freak early winter storm just before Halloween the rightwingers once again brought up how this was proof there isn't "global warming" but when the weather is exceptionally warm for the season, like today, and yesterday, and tomorrow, etc. not a peep from the right on how warm it is for almost December.

Ah the vagaries of ideological purity. Thankfully the left doesn't suffer from that! It's like the problem with the Democratic Party not being as disciplined and speaking with one voice whatever the party line is for the day because people in the Democratic Party are just too damn democratic.

Anyway, hope you're Thanksgiving holiday was as warm and pleasant and loving and satisfying as mine.

PAUL MOTIAN R.I.P.

2011-11-25T23:30:00.001-05:00

One of the greatest of jazz drummers passed recently—Paul Motian. I didn't get a chance to post 'til now.

He played with many of the greatest jazz musicians and innovators of our times, like Carla Bley, and had his own groups for many years. But I first discovered him when he was part of The Bill Evans trio that included the legendary bass player Scott LaFaro.

LaFaro tragically died while they were still a trio, in his mid-twenties. Evans died closer to fifty, but still too young. Motian lived to eighty, for which those who loved his work are grateful.

There's no telling how even greater LaFaro might have been had he lived as long as Evans, let alone Motian. We got to see Evans develop into one of the greatest jazz piano innovators ever, way beyond his first record with Motian and LaFaro which I believe was around 1954.

But on those early recordings, we see who LaFaro and Evans and Motian were becoming, already illustrating some of their signature moves, uniquely their own, a sound that would soon become the sound of the late 1950s and early '60s for me captured best in their 1961 LP WALTZ FOR DEBBIE.

Here's Evans, LaFaro and Motian playing the Miles Davis' tune "Milestones" live, just to give you a taste of how original a drummer Motian already was. I love it and am grateful Motian lived so long and left behind so many great recordings that demonstrate his unique artistry:

IN THE NAME OF...

2011-11-24T10:51:00.002-05:00

I try to start my day with some spiritual exercises to help me prepare for whatever may come.

And this morning I was thinking about the way I prayed when I was a Catholic schoolboy, especially beginning and ending each prayer with "In the name of The Father, the Son and The Holy Ghost" (which later became "Holy Spirit"). I always wanted to add Mary (or "Our Lady" as we called "The Mother of God") and Saint Francis.

Then a list suddenly occurred to me (hallelujah!—for those who don't know I was a compulsive listmaker seemingly since birth and lost that compulsion entirely after brain surgery) that went like this:

"In the name of Mary the mother of Jesus, Saint Francis and Saint Claire, Shakespeare and Nelson Mandela, Ghandi and Martin Luther King..."

Later more names came to me, so I thought I'd make a list of all those that did and come to me now as I type this, occasionally looking at my book shelves for inspiration:

"In the name of...
Jesus,
Mary, mother of Jesus,
and Mary Magdelene
Saint Francis
Saint Claire
Saint Brigid
Pope John XXIII
and Dorothy Day
Ghandi
Martin Luther King
and Mother Theresa
Krishna
Lao Tzu
Buddha
Rumi
and Kabir
Skakespeare
Cervantes
Goethe
Lady Murasaki
William Blake
and Walt Whitman
Henry David Thoreau
Emil Dickinson
William Carlos Williams
William Saroyan
Jack Kerouac
and Bob Kauffman
Oscar Wilde
James Joyce
Samuel Beckett
John M. Synge
Queen Maeve
and Cuchalain
George Washington
and Abraham Lincoln
Bobby Kennedy
and JFK
Bobby Sands
and Chief Joseph
Jimi and Janis
Marilyn and Elvis
John Lennon
Johnny Ace
Frankie Lyman
Kurt Cobain
and Phil Ochs
Frank O'Hara
and Frank Sinatra
Lady Day
Lester Young
Bird
Miles
Monk
and Bill Evans
Eric Dolphy
Scott LaFaro
Clifford Brown
and Fats Waller
Jean Rhys
Martha Gelhorn
Lee Miller
and James Fee
James Haining
and Robert Trammel
Eva Hesse
David Smith
and Willem deKooning
Joe Brainard
and George Schneeman
Tim Dlugos
and Ed Cox
James Schuyler
and Ted Berrigan
Benjamin Franklin
and Thomas Edison
Renoir (both father and son)
Matisse
Bonnard
and Picabia
and among the still living
Nelson Mandela
and The Dali Llama
Bernie Sanders
and Elizabeth Warren
Diane DiPrima
and Pete Seeger
and my children
and grandchildren
and all those I've loved
and still do
Amen.

PS TO LAST POST

2011-11-23T11:02:00.000-05:00

Just to confirm that Fox News is really Faux News check this study out.

FAILURE OF THE SO-CALLED "SUPER COMMITTEE"

2011-11-23T10:06:00.000-05:00

As in almost every attempt at a bipartisan solution to almost every problem our country faces, the intransigence of the right squelches almost all possibilities.

That was the case for the "super committee" where—as in the past—Democrats made concessions that went way beyond what their base wants while the rightwing Republicans refused to budge on letting the "Bush tax cuts" for the wealthy expire (even though when they were introduced Republicans said they'd only be temporary, which was how they got some Democrats to go along, one more instance of the right being better at misleading and manipulating anyone whose nature it is to have faith in their fellow human beings, a big mistake when it comes to the right).

As an example of how the right marches to orders from on high, until a day or so ago many rightwing Republicans were for letting the Obama payroll tax cuts that benefit those who aren't wealthy expire, even while resisting any attempt to let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire.

But the Koch brothers have stepped in (their propagandists probably figuring this wasn't a smart move) to say the payroll taxcuts should be extended, and all of a sudden the rightwing Republican political leaders are changing their minds too. Surprise surprise.

This, to me, is a victory for the Occupy Wall Street protestors, whether they know it or not. The pressure their demonstrations have put on the media to at least pay some attention to the economic realities (i.e. inequities) has raised the awareness of the general populace about the economic disparities in our system.

The right still influences the media to skew toward criticism of the protesters and unfounded reports of individuals among them causing problems or committing crimes (almost uniformly proven to be untrue) as well as incorrect assumptions that there's no "focus" to the protests.

But when shots of protesters carrying signs that accuse Wall Street of destroying the economy and thereby jobs and having too much control over the government are shown, even on rightwing biased media, most of the population, according to polls, agrees.

The reality is that those who agree with the perspective and positions and policies of the right constitute a small minority of our citizens. Most of us have more centrist and liberal views and beliefs. Therefore the right cannot win elections if everyone votes.

But they can if they convince enough voters that there's no difference between the parties and that "Congress" and the presidency are dysfunctional (instead of the reality that the rightwing dominated Republican Party only agrees to measures that protect the wealthy and call for more sacrifice from the rest of us, a highly unpopular position if seen for what it is, which is why the rightwing propaganda machine and media mislead and misinform and lie about that reality to keep it hidden).

But after the last election where enough people came out to vote to overturn or resist rightwing policies in various state and municipal elections, the right realized it had "overreached" (their leaders and media immediately parroted that exact term, though it wasn't overreaching, it was doing exactly what they intended to) and so too with this latest concession to popular opinion the right is merely avoiding being the victims of the unpopularity of most of their ideology.

But the right will always return to its default position of doing and saying anything they need to gain and/or maintain power to be wielded in defense of the interests of the most powerful among us—corporations and those who derive the most wealth from them.

THE IDES OF MARCH

2011-11-22T00:09:00.000-05:00

Went to see THE IDEAS OF MARCH with my friend Bill Lannigan the other night. We had the choice of several movies we both wanted to see but I kept pushing for this one, because George Clooney has yet to disappoint me, as an actor, a director, a movie maker (and a political activist for that matter).

There are only a handful of people whose creativity always works for me, Clooney's one of them. And it was a good call (I think Bill would agree). The cynicism at the heart of the movie I might not agree with entirely, but it's a timely story about political campaigns and the compromises made for success at almost any level of participation.

It's set in a Democratic Governor's campaign to win his party's nomination, so the ideals everyone signs up for are ones I share, but the tactics they end up thinking they have to use to win are ones I've often rejected—in politics and my work and "careers"—which might help explain choices and decisions that kept me from the kind of success I, and others, sometimes envisioned for me. And I suspect that's true for a lot of you reading this.

So even though I believe in the real world there's less use of the kind of cutthroat tactics used by almost everyone in this film, nonetheless, it makes for powerful storytelling. And like I said, anything I've seen Clooney associated with is usually good movie making, including storywise. THE IDES OF MARCH, which he co-wrote, is no exception.

So here's a well told tale, directed economically and wisely by Clooney (who also co-stars as the candidate) and cast brilliantly. The story is worth seeing the movie for, but the acting is too, so it's a double winner.

Ryan Gosling plays the conflicted lead and does his usual expert job of carrying the story on his character's shoulders, though I would have liked an even bigger emotional transition. But he pulls off his more subtle version because he's so good at playing the moment realistically. Then there's Philip Seymour Hoffman at his disheveled best, bringing the reality all the way home, and Paul Giammati matching him move for move.

Even Rachel Wood plays the ingenue role as brilliantly as she always does, a variation done so truthfully I was hooked before the end of her first scene. And Maria Tomei—an unfortunately underutilized actress in my opinion—is as great as she always is, anchoring a subplot with her natural gift for character. Jeffrey Wright, another favorite actor, has a part as well and plays it as it should be played.

THE IDES OF MARCH is about ideas and the behavior they support or are used as an excuse for. You don't get too many of those these days, so again, it's worth seeing for that too. Bottom line, as they say, it's worth seeing.

ANOTHER NON-SPONTANEOUS LIST

2011-11-21T08:42:00.001-05:00

I'm still without what was my lifelong compulsion for listmaking that disappeared after brain surgery. But, like the last list, here's one that comes from my iTunes library which I am compulsively going through alphabetically to make sure I've listened to each song (almost all of which I've heard many times before, including before anything like an iTunes library).

This one was just my noting the songs in my iTunes library whose titles begin with the word "one:"

ONE DRAW Rita Marley
ONE FLIGHT DOWN Norah Jones
ONE FOOT IN THE GUTTER Thelonious Monk
ONE FOR DADDY-O Cannonball Adderly
ONE FOR MY BABY Bill Charlap
ONE FOR MY BABY Frank Sinatra
ONE FOR MY BABY Johnny Mercer (who wrote the lyrics)
ONE FOR MY BABY Fred Astaire
ONE HAND, ONE HEART Carol Lawrence & Larry Kert (original West Side Story cast LP)
ONE IRISH ROVER Van Morrison
ONE MINT JULEP The Clovers
ONE MONKEY DON'T STOP NO SHOW Stick McGhee
ONE MORE CUP OF COFFEE Bob Dylan (Desire)
ONE MORE NIGHT Bob Dylan (Nashville Skyline)
ONE MORNING IN MAY Bill Charlap
ONE NIGHT IN A LIFETIME Donna Summer
ONE O'CLOCK JUMP Count Basie
ONE O'CLOCK JUMP Lester Young
ONE OF THESE DAYS Mose Allison
ONE OF THESE THINGS FIRST Nick Drake
ONE OF US MUST KNOW Bob Dylan (Blonde On Blonde)
ONE PART BE MY LOVER Bonnie Riatt
ONE STEP CLOSER U2
ONE THING Luscious Jackson
ONE TOO MANY MORNINGS Bob Dylan (The Times They Are A-Changin')
ONE WAY OR ANOTHER Blondie

CONTAGION

2011-11-20T00:25:00.002-05:00

It's award season again. So far I'm receiving fewer CDs in the mail from movie producers looking for votes for the SAG and WGA awards etc. The few I've received, I've already seen, except for CONTAGION.

I avoided seeing this because I thought it would be too heavy and, frankly, scary. I never dug horror movies, even as a kid (ironic that the first two movies I had star billing in were both horror flicks). Or any kind of deliberately scary movie. Movies where scares are part of the larger story but not the point I can take, but scary for the sake of scaring the audience just always seemed like a wasted effort to me, a cheap shot.

Anyway, I was wrong about CONTAGION. Although the point may be to scare an audience for either some higher purpose—to have better global preventative protocols to stop the spread of new viruses and diseases etc.—or even just to appeal to audiences that dig being scared (that leaves me out), CONTAGION doesn't work on that level.

Yes there are a few moments of gore where I had to turn away, and intellectually the story is scary. But the movie makers fail to create an emotional connection and therefore stake in the story—mostly in the writing and editing, the acting by contrast is pretty uniformly exemplary.

This often happens with movies—and other art forms—that attempt to make big statements. The emotional resonance gets lost in trying to do too much. It's a challenge with a theme like that of CONTAGION because the story is compelled to cover the globe to make its point that because of globalization we are much more susceptible to bigger and faster spreading epidemics caused by new exposures of humans to all kinds of diseases and viruses etc.

But we already knew that. The story should have concentrated on a few human stories that hooked us emotionally and made us care about the individuals. Instead CONTAGION almost does the opposite, with a few exceptions. there's some really interesting subplots that get lost or dropped or overwhelmed by the main story lines (of which there are too many also).

The producers are suggesting Laurence Fishburne for "Best Actor" awards and Matt Damon and Jude Law for "Best Supporting Actor" awards. But if anyone is the lead in this flick it's Matt Damon, who is always a revelation and is once again here. When he first comes onscreen I didn't recognize him for a minute, thinking the director had found an obscure actor who looked like an American everyman, but then I saw it was Damon. His performance makes the movie worth watching to me.

As does Jude Law's, who plays the foil to Fishburne's character. Fishburne's performance is beautifully understated, but at times I wished for less of that and more emotional relating to the other characters and the audience. But law's performance displays so much variety it's difficult to decided how to react, faking the audience out until almost the end.

Interestingly, the movie makers did not suggest anyone for "Best Actress" just a long list for "Best Supporting Actress"—including Marion Cotillard, always great to watch, Jennifer Ehle, Sanaa Lathan, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet, who should be the one up for "Best Actress" (or female actor as I prefer to label that category).

Winslet, like Damon, is always a revelation and always terrific, and is so here. I'd have liked to see the filmmakers use her and Damon more, especially together. They dropped that possibility way too fast.

I have to blame Steven Soderbergh for this failure of this movie to hook me emotionally, but it's mainly because he let the screenwriter, Scott Z. Burns, get away with trying to do too much without enough time or emotional justification to do it.

Yet, the movie's worth watching as an intellectually engaging premise. My friend Sue, who watched it with me, pointed out that the interconnectedness of all of us caused by globalization is not just a danger regarding disease but that the same set of circumstances that snowballed the contagion in CONTAGION could and may well happen (or may already be) in terms of the globalization of the world economy.

But like everything, this can be "good" or "bad" or most likely both, depending on how it plays out or what seat in the universe you're looking at it from—as say the "bad" results of the way Wall Street's shenanigans led to an nearly worldwide economic collapse, and the Arab Spring awakening led to a widespread, almost worldwide, resurgence of popular movements to demand change in governmental collusion with the interests of the wealthy, etc.

So CONTAGION for my taste is worth watching for some of the acting and for the ideas inherent in the story, but don't expect to end up with any emotional or spiritual or even psychological satisfaction. Just maybe some intellectual gratification.

BILL DEEMER'S VARIATIONS

2011-11-19T00:24:00.000-05:00

It's time for a change of pace. I never mean to post more than twice in a row on a political topic, but this past week was too compelling to ignore (also when I post mostly links, it's because I'm tired or not as sharp and typing my thoughts clearly becomes more of a challenge).

I've been getting a lot of great books in the mail lately. Too many to keep up with here. So tonight I thought I'd mention a book I received unexpectedly recently and didn't know about but found it the perfect antidote to the news these days.

VARIATIONS is a collection of mostly short, or very short, poems that riff off of famous and obscure poets and their poetry (from Basho to William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens to Gary Snyder) yet the poet makes it all his own by whatever the opposite of grandstanding is.

Bill Deemer's poems in VARIATIONS seem to humbly nod to the greatness of other poems and poets and admit openly they're not out to compete with them but to offer a more accessible, more direct (mostly) and simpler take on the same or a similar subject and poetic approach.

And they work so well, it's a book I'll keep on my shelves and return to when I need to read something simple and direct and that'll put a smile on my face and even possibly, in fact most likely, peace in my heart and mind.

Here, for instance, are a couple of his "Epigrams:"

Pray to Saint Quixote
for the courage to be ridiculed.

Pray to Saint Sancho
for the strength to live in doubt.

Or this short poem called "FAME & FORTUNE:"

Fame:
the cows stop eating
to watch me pass.

Fortune:
more blackberries
than I will ever pick.

Reading these short poems, each on a single page surrounded by white, some of them resonate deeply, like a private mantra discovered by accident that calms down the day and opens the heart to the eternal now. And some seem too casually obvious to need much attention at all.

But when I first read through this book, a few pages at a time each night, I always put it down with a little smile on my face, or at least in my heart. It's sincerity matched by its simplicity but based on eternal truths or at least eternal insights, were just what I seemed to need and didn't know it until I began reading, at first skeptical, critical, even judgmental, until I found myself surrendered and open to their easy charm.

I'll end with this little one from "HOMAGE TO ISSA:"

Issa's Lesson:
speaking in the same voice
to humans, insects, plants.

BERNIE'S GOT IT RIGHT, AS USUAL

2011-11-18T12:45:00.002-05:00

[And for those who would argue that nothing should be off the table for cutting, Congress has been borrowing from Social Security funds for decades—that was one of the things Al Gore was for changing, calling for a "lockbox" so those funds could not be raided to pay for other Congressional programs—so in that way Social Security has already been cut and continues to be. If any changes should be made it should be that Social Security funds can not be used for anything but Social Security benefits. If you still insist it has to be cut, than those with millions or billions in the bank that came from earnings not taxed for Social Security shouldn't get any Social Security benefits.]

HERE'S A GOOD QUESTION

2011-11-18T08:10:00.003-05:00

[If you have trouble reading the signs, click to enlarge.]

SMART ANALYSIS (AS USUAL) FROM DIGBY AT HULLABALOO

2011-11-17T08:47:00.000-05:00

Of the dehumanizing of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Here.

ROBERT REICH SAYS IT BETTER (AND MORE SUCCINCTLY) THAN ME

2011-11-16T18:02:00.001-05:00

There was a little exchange of comments on the thread for my last "Deja Vu All Over Again" where it seemed like me and my friend the artist (multi-media, but predominantly a unique painter) seemed to be partly disagreeing. I think it was just differences in emphasis mostly. But this piece by Robert Reich says what I was aiming for and I think Paul was too. Check it out.

THIS IS PRETTY CLEVER (AND CORRECT)

2011-11-16T14:03:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the great photographer and poet friend Kevin McCollister for sending me this link. (To get the full impact click on the rectangular little box in the center with the question in it.)

SHUT UP & DANCE EVENT CANCELED

2011-11-16T11:59:00.002-05:00

For anyone who might be planning on attending my buddy Jamie Rose's tango event in the city to promote her book SHUT UP & DANCE!—it's been canceled.

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN

2011-11-15T14:27:00.004-05:00

In the 1960s, as protests for Civil Rights and/or against the Viet Nam war continued to grow and multiply despite attempts by the police and other law enforcement agencies to stop them, police tactics became more and more repressive and violent.

In fact, that's when the police became militarized, with so-called S.W.A.T. teams all armored up and weaponized on a level rarely seen in this country (though it also happened during strikes and other labor protests in the 1930s and throughout USA history whenever the interests of the "trusts"—i.e. corporations—were threatened by public protest).

We're seeing it again in the police brutality being used against protesters and reporters and observers and even just passersby (as with the innocent bystander who was seriously injured in Oakland last week, etc.) and last night at the original Occupy Wall Street in what was known as "Liberty Plaza" (until it was taken over by a corporation and named for one of the corporation's wealthy big shots).

It's ironic that the rightwing media machine and its mouthpieces (including their political "leaders"—elected or not) that are always going on about "freedom" and "liberty" (though usually unwilling to lay THEIR lives on the line for those concepts, letting the poor and deprived and needy among our youth do that for them) cannot stand to see people actually "demonstrating" those concepts by gathering to protest injustice and demand their rights.

When anyone left of Dick Cheney presumes their Constitutional right to publicly gather and protest, the rightwingers not only attack them for doing that but infiltrate their protests with provocateurs whose job it is to discredit the actions of the protesters while the rightwing media discredit the motives of the protesters.

This coordinated attack on one of our basic freedoms has been happening since the beginning of The Occupy Wall Street movement (but never occurred during Tea Party rallies, despite people carrying guns and being noisy and belligerent and even physical against those who disagreed with their ideas).

The first attempt to discredit the protests was to mark the protesters as disaffected young people who had no idea what they were protesting against or for. That was ridiculous on its face (I took part one day, as I've written, and saw many white haired folks and businessmen in suits and professors and teachers and even off duty cops and firemen etc.).

Then when the movement began obviously gathering supporters across the spectrum, the right—and the media it manipulates so easily—started criticizing the protests for "disturbing the peace" in some way, being too unhygienic or noisy or harboring criminals etc. and thus (from the rightwing perspective) justifying police intervention, no matter how violent.

The Oakland police were the first to move to all out militarization, and if they hadn't inadvertently seriously injured an Iraq Vet and then tried to keep people from helping him, which was caught on camera, they'd have probably gotten away with it (not from the perspective of the protesters and their supporters, including me, but in terms of media attention).

Other local governments—state and county and municipal—have gone the route of allowing the protests to continue until they can cook up the "legal" justification for repressing them, often violently. As in so-called "Zucotti Park" last night.

It is no accident that news helicopters were denied air space over the police action last night at the Wall Street Occupation in Manhattan, and that reporters were kept from getting close enough to take photos or be eyewitnesses to any police brutality, or were roughed up by some cops themselves.

I come from a clan in which there's always been police officers, right from the progenitor of the clan, my Irish peasant immigrant grandfather. So I know firsthand that there truly are "good cops" and "bad cops" and most police do not enjoy getting physical, let alone violent.

There were police last night who didn't rough up reporters, or protesters and there were those who did. But behind their actions are not just politicians but an array of powerful forces consciously or unconsciously doing the bidding of corporate powers and those whose wealth is dependent on those corporate powers.

Why should citizens not be allowed to gather in public and protest and stay as long as they like? Many in the media and among our citizens were impressed with the courage and lasting power of the protesters in "Liberty" Square in Cairo last year, despite police efforts to not just remove them but intimidate them and squash the protest. And they didn't have to contend with the cold!

The excuse is always that it's "disruptive" in whatever ways will most disgust the general public so that police action seems justified. But when someone makes too much noise or is un-hygenic or even commits a crime in your neighborhood, the police don't move in and remove you and your neighbors or destroy your homes.

It's not even ironic that people who supposedly live near Zucotti Park have complained about the noise from drumming. First of all most apartments in those kind of high rises don't even have windows that open, especially on the kind of chilly nights we've been having recently. And the noise from the construction at the nearby World Trade Center memorial and area is radically louder than any drumming (and we know the drumming doesn't go on at night because protesters are sleeping then).

What the authorities dread is the development of "Hoovervilles"—the kind of squatting communities that spontaneously appeared during The Great Depression around the country, like in Central Park and along the rivers in Manhattan (see MY MAN GODFREY among other films from the 'thirties) and expanded before the police, sometimes with the help of military troops, could remove them.

Tahrir Square in Cairo were lauded as heroes among many in the U.S. and the media), in which case (actual crimes) the police can do actual "police" work—not create-a-riot or military action—and find our who committed the crime and arrest them.

The most ridiculous part of all this was that Bloomberg, NYC's mayor, defended last night's action by saying the tents and sleeping bags were making it so "the public" (as if the protesters are somehow "the private"?) couldn't use the park. But I was there on the day when the crowds were the largest, according to all news reports and the police, and yet me and my then thirteen-year-old son and his mother and her younger sister and her boyfriend strolled around the park without any problems. The only problems were the rogue cops who were obviously itching to smack us down for daring to go against their bosses or their own private prejudices or politics.

And now—hey Bloomberg!—the park's been closed all day to the protesters AND THE PUBLIC(!) protected by a phalanx of cops in riot gear. Where are all the defenders of the Constitution now? (Protesting the closing of the park, actually.)

Where this militarization of the police and repression of protesters and demonstrators led in the 1960s and '70s was to calling in the National Guard and the four deaths of student protesters at Kent State (where even if rocks were thrown, although that's still debatable, being shot to death is not the reasoned or democratic response).

And where that led the protesters was the extreme radicalization of some of them who came to believe Mao's dictum that "power comes out of the barrel of a gun." I argued against that, because I don't believe it's ultimately true. But having the police use military tactics to deal with citizen protesters obviously can, and sometimes does, lead to some protesters becoming militarized themselves.

But more often agent provocateurs working for the police or corporations etc. encourage and instigate violence from protesters in response to violence from the police, to thus justify total repression of the protesters and their cause. And the agents' actions create paranoia among the protesters because it is unclear who is really protesting and who is there only to stir up trouble to discredit the protest.

Because of the Internet and the generally speedier transmission of images and words these days, what took the Civil Rights and Anti-War protests many years to evolve through stages of protest—and reactions from the authorities in the form of police actions—is occurring in a matter of only months for this movement. I'm hoping that doesn't mean that violence will escalate equally rapidly.

In fact I'm hoping the protests can remain non-violent like the early Civil Rights protests did, because the moral authority inherent in that approach won over many more supporters than when the protests turned violent in response to police violence.

AI WEI WEI IS STILL MY HERO

2011-11-15T00:39:00.000-05:00

See why here.

TWO YEARS

2011-11-13T23:26:00.000-05:00

Just a quick addition to today's posts. This day, November 13th, two years ago, I had brain surgery. To have lived in any time before the last ten years or so, would mean that I wouldn't be writing this. Not only would I not be able to, I'd probably not even be around to do it. So I am eternally (or as much as I have left of it) grateful.

TOWER HEIST

2011-11-13T20:25:00.004-05:00

So the movie I saw with my daughter and older son yesterday was TOWER HEIST. I was pretty sure—given the cast and others involved—it could be an easy movie to agree on, an action comedy heist picture, sure Hollywood escapism.

The best heist flick I've seen since THE TOWN, with parts of it equally improbable, but instead of serious, TOWER HEIST is very funny, though not quite as escapist as it might seem, because the plot involves getting revenge against a Wall Street investor who seems to be getting away with...well, the usual Wall Street crime.

The cast is worth the price of admission, for me, and to have laugh-'til-you're-squeaking moments cascade into missing-half-the-lines-in-a-scene is pretty satisfying too when you're looking to be entertained. The timeliness of the plot, almost an Occupy Wall Street storyline on some levels, is an accident, since the story idea's been around for a while and the project took years to make happen.

The secret to getting it made, I heard, was getting Eddie Murphy to co-star in it with Ben Stiller, the lead. Stiller is still one of the movies best comic actors, and he proves it in TOWER HEIST. And Murphy, as much as he can sometimes aggravate me, is the most successful (tickets sold, money made) movie comedian of all time, yep, for a reason too. When the man's funny, he's hysterical. This is the best thing he's done in a while for my taste too.

Then there's the supporting cast. Like a sports dream team. Matthew Broderick's deadpan rim shots had me bending over from laughing so hard, and when he breaks that pattern (unusual for him) and becomes manic for a minute, it's even funnier. And Casey Affleck is one of my favorite movie actors out there right now. There doesn't seem to be anything he can't do or convince me he can.

His role in TOWER HEIST calls for a little deadpan, a little dim, a little foil for Stiller and he nails it. As does Tea Leoni, an actress I fall in love with almost every time I see her on screen. She has one of the best drunk scenes in films in TOWER HEIST and it only lasts a few minutes.

The entire cast is pretty terrific, including Alan Alda as the Wall Street big shot and Judd Hirsch as "management" but—one of the smartest and best casting choices the filmmakers made in TOWER HEIST was hiring Gabourney Sidibe. I remember when she was nominated for her starring debut role in PUSH some critics and commentators were saying it was sad that she was given all that attention because a young woman who looked like her (very heavy and very dark) would probably never be hired for a role again. Their thinking being how many roles can there be for anything other than traditional good-looking whatevers.

Duh! It made me totally angry because she obviously is an amazing actress. Fortunately, she went on to prove it in everything I've seen her in since, like her role in THE BIG C on cable and now her role as a Jamaican maid in TOWER HEIST.

She gives everyone a run for the money in this flick and pulls it off so adroitly, if they gave Oscars for comic roles, she'd deserve a nomination.

Don't get me wrong, this is pretty much Hollywood fluff, but some of the best comic fluff in a while. Brett Ratner, the director, might be a jerk in some ways (as I've heard from Hollywood friends and he seemed to prove by making what could be interpreted as anti-gay remarks on Howard Stern's show (surprise surprise) (whether they were or not the producers of the Oscars immediately fired him from directing that show this season and with him went Eddie Murphy as the host) but (if you remember the beginning of the sentence still) he (Ratner, the director) proves with TOWER HEIST that there's more to funny movies than Judd Apatow and his many admirers and imitators.

Check it out, just for laughs (and for what I assume will be Heavy D's last appearance in a flick in a cameo as a courthouse guard, may he rest in peace).

ANOTHER GREAT BERKSHIRE WEEKEND (PART ONE)

2011-11-12T23:11:00.000-05:00

Last night got to see and hear my oldest son, Miles, perform with the band he plays bass in (Bell Engine) at The Red Lion Den, an old and venerable pub in the basement of The Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Not only was it a terrific night, with two hot and loose sets by the band, but I had the thrill of hearing the one song Miles has written both the music and words for, "Soul Breaker," played twice. The second time at the end of the last set when there was five minutes left for an encore and several in the Friday night crowd shouted for his song.

If I had been a cartoon and/or wearing a button up shirt the buttons on my chest would have popped. A song only heard a few times by anyone, only recently recorded on Bell Engine's first CD, but not released yet (soon, you can find out when from the website bellengine.com) and already being requested by shouts from the audience? Pretty cool.

And all this on another beautiful Berkshires weekend. Though last night it was cold and snowing a bit. Still, today the sun came out and despite the chill lit up the hills and mountains and few remaining trees with turning leaves of Autumn colors, including the bright yellows and flaming reds and almost neon oranges.

The backdrop to another great day to be alive as I spent it with my daughter Caitlin and Miles (a long while since we had the chance to hang out without spouses and younger kids) and a little trip to Pittsfield, the main city in The Berkshires. Part of the main drag has been renovated and we went to an almost brand new multiplex movie theater, The Beacon, that is state of the art, after getting some chai lattes at a brand new coffee and soup and sandwich cafe Market Place, where the service is always terrific, the food good and the vibe Berkshire comfortable.

After the flick we checked out a new and very stylish restaurant, Spice Dragon, also on the main street. It's run by a Vietnamese chef who prepares dishes from various Asian cultures. I had a Malaysian curry dish with super thin noodles and a variety of vegetables just spicy enough to keep me awake and alert to the nuances of the other flavors.

Hope all this renewal pays off for a community in need of some successes (Pittsfield that is, not the other more chic small towns and villages that make up the rest of "The Berkshires" and all that stands for). These businesses seemed to be doing pretty well, so maybe. The movie was packed by a crowd that seemed pretty happy with the film we went to see, but more about that tomorrow.

VETERAN'S DAY

2011-11-11T11:18:00.003-05:00

As a veteran of over four years in the U.S. military when I was in my late teens and early twenties back when there was a draft, I call for a return to the draft, for men and women alike, with no one being exempt who hasn't served.

There is no way universal citizens military service would have allowed for the duplicity surrounding the invasion of Iraq or for that war to go on so long, or any other. As it is now, with a volunteer military, only those who see military service as a way of earning a living when no other opportunity exists, or of getting a higher or technical education when that becomes cost prohibitive for many, or who just like the idea of working with weapons and possibly engaging in violent acts with them (not uncommon especially among young men but only a handful discover that's what they truly want when confronted with the reality).

I didn't do any fighting, because one of the great aspects of the military when I served back in the early 1960s was that every job the military needed done to accomplish their mission—which is supposed to be to protect the citizens of the united States—was done by military personnel.

Nowadays, most jobs, from laundry to logistics is done mostly by private contractors, who usually are paid more than they would were they in the military, costing tax payers more money, and are not under the same restrictions or discipline or even motivation. One of the reasons millions and millions—billions anyone?—of dollars have "disappeared" or been "lost" in the profiteering from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

I don't think it's a coincidence that it was under a Republican administration that the draft was ended and an all-"volunteer" army became a reality. That was 1973, if I remember correctly, at the peak of the Viet Nam War after the Nixon/Kissinger escalation (following their campaign promise, again, of ending it) when more soldiers were against the war than for it.

The variety of citizens' backgrounds, ethnicity, economic status (though the rich, as always could often get out of the military if they were drafted but well connected) especially during WWII made the military one of the most democratic organizations in history. And it was a great education, being exposed to others from backgrounds different and perhaps feared.

I slept in the top of a double bunk in a barracks with sixty or more young men which included one of the first Mexican-Americans I ever met (my two best buddies in basic training were Puerto Rican and African-American, but they were ethnicities I was familiar with), the first Southerners and guys from other regions I had yet to travel to or encounter, and even a couple of dudes from wealthy backgrounds.

Having to work together as a unit despite our differences allowed for an unprecedented opening up to possibilities barely glimpsed before by some of these young men. They called me things like "be-bop" because I played jazz and talked like a jazz musician of the time, or "New York" even though I was originally from Jersey but called Manhattan my home then and talked about how much I missed it incessantly, or "Irish" or "Paddy" for my ethnic background.

And they were given nicknames like "Harlem" and "Iowa" and "Reb" or "Jersey" etc. If our units had included an even wider variety like females and older citizens, the education we were giving each other and receiving in tolerance and acceptance and understanding would have been even broader. But those kind of qualities were not high on the conservative Republican list of things desired in military troops, they were traits admired more by liberals.

If every citizen knew firsthand what those in the military have to contend with and how our government policies impact the military on a personal level, not only would our politicians (most of whom these days have not served in the military) be a lot more open to peaceful solutions to our problems with other nations and entities, but they'd also have firsthand knowledge of all the various groups individual citizens identify with and feel they represent.

I can't tell you how much I learned from being exposed to the raw racism of some of the men I had to work with in the service, whether from the North or the South, though much more from the latter during a time when the South was still mostly segregated, a reality I experienced firsthand when stationed in South Carolina (where I got to see Bob Jones university and what it stands for up close too).

So, even though only a handful of politicians these days have ever called for the draft to be renewed, this individual citizen is calling for it not just to honor the service of the veterans who served and are honored on this day—like my three deceased older brothers, and many cousins and nephews etc.—but to create a military based on the concept the Founding Fathers had, a true citizens army.

ELINOR NAUEN'S SO LATE INTO THE NIGHT

2011-11-10T13:25:00.001-05:00

Poet/writer and friend Elinor Nauen has always been an original. But her latest book, SO LATE INTO THE NIGHT, is one of those unique creations that makes discovering them one of life's great pleasures.

What makes SO LATE INTO THE NIGHT so distinctive? Well, paradoxically, the first thing that's so unusual about this book-length poem is that it uses the same rhyme scheme that Byron used for his long poem DON JUAN.

Okay, you say, how does imitating the poetic structure of someone else's poem add up to something so seemingly unprecedented? Because of what she does with that form.

First of all a contemporary poem with DON JUAN'S ottava rima (a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c) rhyming pattern is unusual enough in these times, but to make it even more so, the requirements of the form cause Nauen to sometimes break the words in her conversational narrative flow in places no grammarian (or computer generated hyphenating algorithm) would ever permit. And her use of off-rhymes or near-rhymes or sight-rhymes, and more, delights in ways that compliments the irreverent playfulness of Nauen's autobiographical ruminations.

Second of all, and this may seem an awfully dated reality but, there aren't too many book length poems written by women poets, and none I can think of as lustily yet humorously graphic or sexually and sensually celebratory, let alone so biographically candid, as SO LATE INTO THE NIGHT (a lot of which can't be quoted in this family-friendly blog).

Reading this poem-book made me wish I could become friends with Elinor all over again, because she comes across as someone so funny and endearingly honest, even though with obsessions I don't share (like baseball and a certain player's bum). Just selecting some stanzas at random (I swear) I can find examples of her wit and openness (though this selection is more restrained than many others might be):

"Okay, so we've cruised on up to the park,

We've bought our tickets (your usual seat?

The seller asked) and strolled to where the arc

Of blue sky and insanely green field meet,

Scimitared by the curving of the dark-

White, roofless Yankee arches. Summer heat

Flutters as we climb up to our children-

Of-paradise seats in this great cauldron.

Not that while incorporating the -eet

Rhymes (above), I refrained from using the one

That would seem obvious, that is: Derek Jet-

Er. What is a jeter? One who jetes? Done

How, and why, do you suppose? With the feet?

Does it mean something in Romanian?

It would be too cheap a shot to put here

One more aside re Derek's divine rear."

Though she did it anyway, and got away with it. But don't let me give the idea this poem is all "light verse"—though Nauen does make a case for a positive and humorous perspective. She also addresses the challenges of living the life of a freelance writer and editor and poet on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and of her marriage (to fellow writer Johnny Stanton) and of her discovery of a desire to study her ancestral (at least in part) Jewish faith, and her reaction to witnessing 9/11 from the rooftop of her tenement building and of the array of tragicomic characters who come and go there, and more.

But her tone is so open and inviting, her candor so humble (in the true sense of that word: i.e. realistic) and both expansive and inclusive, it made me wish the poem went on even longer. I think you will feel the same way once you let the rhythms of her poetic push for updated Byronesque exuberance take over your mind's ear and eye.

Here's another random sample that defends that perspective:

"Ennui or accidie was once a sin

And now an aspiration. Those who are

Melancholy look down on the cheerful in

Their 'shallowness.' Yet despair is not far

From forfeit. Why do people seem proud to hin-

Der good works and choose futility? Hard

As it may be to believe the world works

Well, it's worse to live where hopelessness lurks."

and this James Schuyler-esque riff:

"I remember standing in our driveway

On the first day of summer vacation

When the gloriously promising days

Stretched ahead. The peonies' libation

Of scent and ants shook pinkly. A blue jay

Rattled in the pine I climbed impatient

For a view. The lilies of the valley

next to the house, slightly off the alley

Would be gone by then—in spring I'd lie down

To drink their scent. I think no one else knew

They were there. Prairie sky above, a mound

Of cumulus clouds in billowing blue.

Plains are pure primary color. You drown

In floods of red, white, green and yellow, new

Every day, blown fresh by the eternal

Wind that swoops from vernal to infernal."

No stanzas I quote from can do justice to the experience of reading this flowing commentary on what it means to be alive, have a history that's still evolving including being a half-Jewish woman from South Dakota ending up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with lusty appetites yet happily married to an Irish-American New Yorker while making a living as a freelance writer and editor and writing in an outdated form a book-length revealing poem that captures the temporal drive of an engaged mind as it mostly delights in just being alive and able to witness and experience and record what that's like in these times.

The only way to experience the fullness of life is to live it fully. The only way to experience the generative power of this unique poetic creation is to read it from beginning to end. I promise you'll find much to engage and delight you.

OCCUPYING WALL STREET (BRIEFLY FOR NOW)

2011-11-09T10:15:00.004-05:00

The media and those who succumb to its distortions continues to cast most of our reality in terms the right dictates, directly or indirectly.

The network and cable news I mostly watch—and even the NPR news I listen to on the radio—and the right claims is "liberal" or biased from the left (though for many years now there's only been the right and the center at work in official party politics) sometimes does show a bias toward a more centrist or even "liberal" perspective of a news story.

But ultimately they incorporate the right's perspective and give it more weight than it warrants (if 99 percent of scientists say global warming is real and humans causes are at least part of the reason and one percent denies that, how can they be seen as equal sides of the argument?) or don't include any alternative to the right except for something more or less right, but never left.

Anyway, this is true of the media's response to Occupy Wall Street. At first the response was that the occupiers had no message, were unclear about what they were protesting and/or demanding. Which, of course, was not true. A variety of ways of expressing their anger at what Wall Street represents and mostly is does not mean there was no message, just a varied way of declaring it.

But of course the news media has become so much about commenters and commenting and so little about actual reporting that their formats demand segments focused on one interpretation of an event and the supposed "two sides" to the argument about it.

When that early complaint from the media was simply proven false by the relentless reality of the demonstrations themselves, the media switched to a new false but equally rightwing influenced perception of the Occupy Wall Street movement, that it is not diverse enough, in terms of class and "race."

I know this is false just from my brief participation in the demonstrations and from friends who have taken part and continue to. Look at almost any video on the web of a day at Occupy Wall Street and you'll see not only more diversity than in probably any neighborhood in "America" but than in any demonstration you've ever seen before.

Are there more "white" people generally demonstrating and occupying the Liberty Plaza, maybe, though if you actually go by the ethnic and so-called "racial" breakdown of our country's population from my observations there is a higher percentage of diversity in the park than in the country (except perhaps for Hispanic participation, but then that can't be discerned simply from looking at the people participating).

At any rate, here's some footage from the day I took part, see if you can spot anyone who isn't totally "white" (whatever that means anyway) or looks like there might be any variety in their "class"—though 99% incorporates a lot of variation in financial status and background.

By the way, if you look to your right of the screen at 5:13 minutes in you might see an old white haired gent looking, I must admit, pretty "white" and "un-classy" (yeah, yours truly).

[You can pause it at 5:13 or 5:14 to catch me, and on YouTube it's bigger if that helps.]
[PS: I meant to thank Annabel Lee for sending me the alert and the link to this video.]

CORPORATE SPONSORED CYNICISM

2011-11-08T10:14:00.007-05:00

The rightwing (mostly Republican) upholders and supporters and minions and justifiers (etc.) of corporate power continue to rule a lot of our individual and collective lives.

Progressive and liberal (mostly Democratic) politicians and activists and supporters sometimes, not often enough for my taste, challenge corporate control of so much in and of our lives.

In order to disengage, defuse, weaken or just overwhelm any and all opposition to corporate power, an overt and a stealth campaign continues to turn potential activists into cynics who "opt out" which, in this almost totally wired society means passively submit to corporate control whether obvious or not.

The reason I'm bringing this up is my recent following of a few cable TV shows recommended by friends. The first is in its second season: HBO's BOARDWALK EMPIRE. This could have been a very sophisticated show (it's produced by Martin Scorcese, among other film luminaries, and he directed the pilot) based on real life characters in prohibition era Atlantic City.

There are so many possible story lines and important themes in the real history (women's rights, racism and civil rights, veterans issues including post-WWI traumas, political and criminal intrigue etc.) that several seasons could have been done based on reality alone. And it could have been a terrific history lesson and even helped understand the political issues of our time.

But nooooo. They had to take the knee jerk easiest way to "get eyeballs" as they say, i.e. a large audience, by creating fictional characters and story lines that give the impression that everyone in 1920s Atlantic City and beyond were selfish, self-centered, cynical and extremely violent opportunists who would stoop to almost anything, and in some cases beyond that, for their short term benefit.

[The characters above are fictional (on the left) and based on a real person (right) but equally unrealistically (and un-historically) violent (directly or indirectly).]

The violence depicted in BOARDWALK EMPIRE is so gratuitous and egregious it makes THE SOPRANOS look innocent. It breaks my heart that so much good acting and camera work and art direction and other film making skills are wasted on over-the-top portrayals of a kind of evil that certainly exists and may have back then and there, but nowhere near the extent depicted.

Then there's BOSS on I think the STARZ cable network. It too has a big star in the lead role (it's always interesting to watch Steve Buscemi in BOARDWALK EMPIRE) Kelsey Grammer, mostly known as a comic actor, and one I wasn't as crazy about as everyone else seemed to be, cast here as a big city (Chicago) political mayor/boss in the present, a present that again seems to have not one redeeming character.

Everyone in BOSS reveals a self-serving petty and even evil core that casts contemporary "American" life as full of selfish pariahs or victims whose victimhood has turned them into selfish pariahs. It's depressing as hell. Literally. The counterintuitive casting of Kelsey Grammer works on some levels, and his performance, especially dealing with a brain disease causing his thinking to freeze or glitch or misfire in ways I recognize, is often captivatingly effective.

But in the service of what? Overwhelming an audience with the idea, just as in BOARDWALK EMPIRE, that all politics is conducted on the level of Satan and the hellhounds? Give me a break, please.

Then there's a new show I couldn't get past the opening of, HELL ON WHEELS on AMC (I think). Just the premise pissed me off. It's purportedly a serious historic drama with the race to complete the transcontinental railroad as the backdrop. But the main character, the "hero" if you will, is an ex-Confederate soldier whose wife was murdered by those damn Yankee soldiers.

I'm so sick of the myth of Southern "honor" and rectitude in defense of Northern aggression and dishonorable violence this kind of set up makes me want to scream. Was it Dickens or some other 19th century luminary that encountered on a trip to the Southern U.S. the deliberate and public burning of a slave that made him say it would be better if the USA failed and the wilderness and natives took the country over again?

The South's cause was NOT honorable, nor somehow based on gentlemanly rules and carried out with consideration and charm. The "Southern way of life" was based on the brutal and deadly violence meted out to slaves considered on a par with animals, and the war was waged just as brutally and dishonorably.

Yes there were atrocities on both sides, but the forerunner of Auschwitz was not any prisoner-of-war camp in the North where Confederate soldiers were kept, it was the ones in the South where Union soldiers were tortured and starved to death, among other brutalities. There was honor enough as well, and kindness and courtesy and an attempt to be as civilized as the times and circumstances permitted on both sides.

But where are the classic Hollywood movies about the kindness and courtesy of Union troops in the South or the Yankees defending not only their honor and the honor of their women and children but of fellow humans being treated like animals and worse. Unfortunately most of the classic Westerns and Civil War movies of Hollywood's classic era were influenced by the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction Era's attempts by the North not to rub in the South's defeat and to leave them with their myth of an "honorable" cause carried out with gentlemanly courtesy and charm.

Not that the little I saw of HEEL ON WHEELS had much of the latter. It seemed more like what used to be straight-to-video bloodfest films that were so ridiculously over-the-top they were more camp than serious. But these days, that kind of depiction of gratuitous violence and evil seems to be taken very seriously, ala all these shows and the only one worth watching, in my opinion, HOMELAND (though I will probably stay hooked to BOARDWALK EMPIRE and BOSS for the acting).

What makes HOMELAND at least a little better is, first of all, its star Claire Danes. After her almost unbelievably unique and amazing performance as the lead in the story of Temple Grandin (am I getting that last name right?) she has become in my mind our greatest living actress. And in HOMELAND she proves it for my taste.

She not only plays an intelligence agent but one with a secret mental illness in a story line about a returning veteran who was held as a prisoner of war by terrorists for eight years. She suspects during that time he was "turned" and is now a sleeper agent for terrorism. The show provides enough clues to support that, but also enough to support the counter argument that he is just suffering from the trauma of being beaten and tortured and generally abused by his captors.

Unfortunately, this show also has too much gratuitous violence (okay, showing blood in a movie was a revolutionary act back in the 1960s but after decades of buckets of blood it's no longer a radical gesture, just an obvious one and a cheap one at that). And like the others, though in a much more compelling and sophisticated way, could easily be used as a justification for the kind of cynicism that leads to futility and giving up any belief that there's any point to fighting the powers-that-be, which ultimately, are corporations, the same ones backing these shows.

[Full discosure: I met and read poetry with (in my case my own, in hers Alice Notley's) Claire Danes a few years ago, see photo below.]

KRUGMAN NAILS IT AGAIN: THERE'S HOPE IF WE CAN ONLY ACCEPT IT!

2011-11-07T08:29:00.000-05:00

Here.

HEY, IF YOU'RE ANYWHERE NEAR NYC THIS WEDNESDAY EVENING

2011-11-06T23:46:00.001-05:00

Check this out.

ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL FALL DAY

2011-11-06T00:20:00.000-04:00

It's been a brilliantly beautiful week capped by today's pure blue sky and the clarity of Autumn sunlight making the bright colored leaves illuminate the trees as though they were created just to give delight, which maybe they were.

And then this evening my best pal Jamie Rose gave an equally brilliant reading/talk from and about her book SHUT UP & DANCE! at the local bookstore with friends and family in attendance.

Now, if only the corporation in charge of power in this part of the world could find a way to get the still live wire hanging into the street just one building up from mine, keeping my street still blocked off with police tape and barricades.

Like I said in an earlier post and I'm sure so many are feeling in this area and the surrounding states: How's that corporations-can-do-it-better-than-the-government thingee working out for y'all? Not so hot if you're still waiting for the power to be turned on, or live wires to be removed or repaired.

Given the "weather events" of the past year and the recent scientific conclusion (see SCIENCE magazine) that the predictions for the damage done by global warming were too optimistic—it's happening much faster and having a bigger impact already than they thought—you'd think the power companies would be better prepared, or would use some of their enormous profits to hire more workers and buy more trucks and equipment etc. and that even Republican politicians would want to get the government involved, raise revenues to hire workers to rapidly respond to these catastrophes and better prepare for them.

But nope, it's business as usual, meaning business makes even more money and those at the top who work in that business do too, while the rest of us sink into the "new normal"—or as I've been calling it for many years now, "the new Dark Ages" (in more ways than one).

SHUT UP & DANCE!

2011-11-04T09:42:00.004-04:00

If you're anywhere near Maplewood, New Jersey, tomorrow evening at 7:30 I highly recommend you stop by the local bookstore, WORDS, to see my very funny, yet still glamorous, multi-talented regular commenter on this blog and dear old pal, Jamie Rose read from and sign her part self-help part-autobiographical first book (full disclosure: I helped edit it and am quoted in it) SHUT UP & DANCE!

It's the story of how she found lasting romance (not to mention marriage) by overcoming her need to "run the show" all the time (in relationships) because that's how she achieved her independence and success as a film and TV actress in the competitive world of Hollywood.

She grew up acting, starting when she was barely past toddlerhood, becoming a household fixture for many as a young woman on the '80s TV hit FALCON CREST and later playing the first uniformed, solo, female cop on TV in a show built around her character: LADY BLUE.

In more recent years you've seen her as a guest star on everything from E.R. to TWO AND A HALF MEN, and in such cult classic films as BIKER CHICKS IN ZOMBIETOWN!

She's always been a terrific writer and I'm happy that's come together in her first book which not only tells the story of how she found lifelong romance after a lifetime of start-and-stop mini-love-stories that didn't work out because of...well, read the book, which, by the way is worth it if only for the photos, but also contains some great exercises for discovering "the goddess" in yourself (aimed obviously at the ladies) as well as how to have a more fluid, balanced and lasting relationship with your mate of any gender.

Come by if you can: I'll be there for sure, tomorrow, Saturday, November 5th, 7:30PM, WORDS, 179 Maplewood Avenue, Maplewood, NJ.

[And if you can't make it, buy the book!—the freelance actor/writer gig ain't easy to make work in any economy, but these days...]

DOUG LANG & RON SILLIMAN

2011-11-03T12:59:00.003-04:00

Went into the city last night to the poetry project at St. Mark's to hear Doug Lang and Ron Silliman read their poetry. What a delight it was.

Doug is a dear friend from DC who I don't get to see that often, so it was just a pleasure to be in his company. He is also one of my favorite poets and writers but publishes sporadically and had never read at St. Mark's before, so it was an event just to hear him.

What a pleasant surprise to then discover he would read all new never before heard (at least by those of us in the room last night) poems, a series of sonnets that were as "chiseled" (old friend, poet Bruce Andrews' term) and yet expansive, as Michelangelo sculptures.

Each sonnet created a narrative drive without being a "story" and offered juxtapositions and dissonances that kept your mind alert and rewarded for it, as well as offering humor and poignancy wrapped in a word machine that seemed at once original and familiar.

I couldn't have asked for a better poetry experience. And thankfully my brain was functioning well enough to be able to follow his unique language structures and enjoy them (though walking to the event after dinner with another old friend and poet, Simon Pettet, and to the nearby bar after the event with a small crowd of old friends, I couldn't take the street sounds and sights, which up until the brain operation I'd always found exhilarating but now find almost painful).

Ron read second and it was a treat to hear him. I can't even remember the last time I heard him read but I suspect it was probably in the 1970s, which was also the last time I'd seen him I think. I first became aware of his work in the late 1960s or early '70s and included some in a poetry anthology I put together in 1974 that came out in '76 called NONE OF THE ABOVE. I dug his work then and have since been impressed with the ways he has expanded on his original poetic strategies.

Unlike Doug, Ron's work is much more readily available, but most of what he read last night was recent work and new to me. He is one of our most prolific poets and writers (his "Silliman's Blog" was one of, if not the, first poetry blog on the Internet and is I believe the most read). And whereas Doug's books, even his early novels, are mostly slim volumes, Ron has a few that rival Pound's CANTOS (like his ALPHABET, which is actually bigger than THE CANTOS).

It was a great match up, a terrific and even unique poetry event. And it was even more satisfying to me because there were so many old friends from the poetry world there, like my oldest friend in that world, Ray DiPalma, and the aforementioned Bruce Andrews and Simon Pettet, and John Godfrey and Vyt Bakaitis, Michael Gottlieb and James Sherry, Elinor Nauen and more.

Quite a delight, for which I'm grateful, as I am for so much these days, including the beautiful Fall weather we are having today, even though there are still small patches of snow around town and neighbors still without electricity or heat (Silliman, who lives in Pennsylvania said he's been without either for five days after the recent almost unprecedented October snowstorm) and still live wires blocking streets (including the one I live on) almost a week since the storm and the local power corporations still undermanned and under-equipped, though profits are up as usual (so how's that "let- corporations-take-care-of-us-they-can-do-it-better-than-the-government" thing working out for ya—and the rest of us—mister and missus rightwinger?).

A (HOPEFULLY) NONCONTROVERSIAL POST

2011-11-02T16:25:00.003-04:00

Me at the piano on the small stage at The Cornelia Street Cafe just before the reading started that I took part in Oct. 20th. I'm not sure who took the photo, maybe the reading organizer my old pal Eve Brandstein. The reason I don't know is because I was so intent on playing quietly, I thought no one was noticing and was completely unaware that someone was standing on the stage taking a photograph! That's the kind of focus it seems only (almost) creative work can bring to me, otherwise I'm the original easily distrac..."Squirrel!"

It was a nice piano, a Yamaha baby grand, great action, a delight to play around on. When I got up from it there was a little burst of applause which also surprised me since I thought I was playing so quietly and folks were busy talking and socializing that no one even noticed. A sweet moment for someone who rarely plays privately, let alone publicly.

HAPPY CELTIC NEW YEAR!

2011-11-01T23:19:00.000-04:00

I wanted to get that greeting out before the day is done.

"BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT"

2011-11-01T10:58:00.001-04:00

On the second "snow day" for my young son and his schoolmates because of the second weather catastrophe for our state, New Jersey, in only a mater of months (the snow isn't what's keeping him home from school, the downed wires are, which includes a live one only one building up from the old house our apartment is in resulting in our street being closed off since the weekend) I want to offer this video that is making the rounds among some of my friends, including my friend and neighbor "Doc" Burke who sent it to me.

I don't agree with everything the speaker in this video says, but I appreciate his reasoned, logical argument for seeing our president and his achievements more "relistically":

BACK TO THE [GLOBAL WARMING] FUTURE

2011-10-31T11:56:00.005-04:00

As Bill Maher points out so often these days, we have to call it "climate change" because otherwise the rightwingers confuse the issue because it still gets cold some places, averages being a difficult mathematical and "scientific" concept for them.

Nonetheless, the climate change brought about by global warming that was predicted by weather scientists has become a reality and is impacting all of us in one way or another very realistically. It's no longer a theory, obviously. The early winter we're having in the Northeast is a perfect example.

Yes, seasonal anomalies have occurred throughout history, including in my lifetime and yours, but not the extent they are occurring now and in recent years. As we all know, or can learn, by checking the stats, the warmest years on record have all occurred in the past decade, and rainfall records and extreme temperature variations etc. have occurred in the last few years as well.

So even though there are a few pre-winter Nor-Easters on the records over the past few hundred years, when you combine the one we just went through this weekend with other extreme record-breaking weather events of the past few years, welcome to the future brought to you by global warming.

I was up in the Berkshires at my oldest son's family's place where over a foot of heavy wet snow fell. We were actually snowed in, but luckily retained power. When the snow stopped Sunday morning and the cars were dug out and what looked like a foot and a half of snow was shoveled and brushed off them, my youngest son and I drove back to Jersey in a rare snowscape that was more like a movie dream sequence than a Christmas card.

The seasons in this part of the world were so finely tuned by nature [and evolution (oh no!)], that by the time the first really heavy snow of winter came, all the leafs were off the trees and the amount of snow that could accumulate on a tree branch was minimal, almost more of an outline than a burden.

But this weekend the snow was so thick and wet (the "snowflakes" looked more like small snowballs) as it accumulated on branches still full of leaves, it became too heavy for the branches to bear the weight and they either bent low to the ground (it was a trip to watch my daughter-in-law just tap a long branch of a ten foot tall bush bent down to the ground with the snow shovel and watch the snow fall off as the branch sprang back like a catapult and stood straight up in the air again as though brought back to life from near death) or broke entirely and were strewn across roads or smashed onto roofs of cars and houses often pulling electrical and telephone wires down with them.

The trip back was stunning and challenging. The countryside was so profoundly beautiful all covered in not just pristine whiteness but a whiteness that looked poured and melted in a unique way and amount. I pointed out to my son how rare a sight it was because nature normally doesn't cause this kind of snowfall until after the leaves are gone and the trees can withstand it.

It was stop and start as we sometimes inched our way around fallen branches and trees and in one case under one that had fallen in such a way as to create a tunnel only one relatively small car at a time could go through (buses and trucks and bigger vehicles were forced to turn back).

Even when we got further South into lower New York state and were on a big highway not a two-lane country road, there were still moments when branches or trees would fall or bend and block a lane so that at one point a car several vehicles ahead of us hit their brakes so hard it created what looked like the smoke from a big fire and the smell of burning rubber stayed with us for miles.

At one point on a back country road a snow-laden branch fell up ahead of us onto the road and, as often happens in adrenaline charged moments, seemed to occur in slow motion as I watched it hit the road and managed to find an extremely narrow path around it just in time. And then made it home to find our street blocked by fallen branches (the trees around here and up North are often so large that a "branch" is the size of a small, or not so small, tree) that took wires down with them.

Most of the trip there were no stoplights working or store lights on and the usual roadside joint we stop at for lunch (the famous "Red Rooster"—at least famous in that area of the central Hudson Valley) as well as all the others were closed because of no power.

We passed two gas stations in the several hour trip that had lines extending out from them reminiscent of the 1970s gas shortage, only more so. One line seemed to extend for more than a mile with folks out of their cars hanging out talking, the cars pulled onto the shoulder of the road and backed up as far as we could see. They were the only gas stations with their own generators I guess.

My youngest doesn't have school today. Even though the snow is mostly melted here, at least in the streets, so it would normally not be considered a "snow day" it still is, because there are so many trees and branches that have downed wires that it's unsafe for the kids to walk down many blocks in our town for fear of accidentally touching a live one.

If this were the only odd weather event of the past decade, or of my son's life, etc. it would not be unusual. But in his now fourteen years there have been many, and more and more as the years pass. This is a result of the climate change being caused by global warming and almost every scientist, and close to a total consensus of weather scientists, acknowledge this.

Yet the rightwingers, including the main one who comments on this blog, continue to idiotically taunt us "liberals" with the reality of unusually cold winter weather for early Fall, but have been and will be nowhere in the comments threads when the inevitable (these days anyway) hot spell hits between now and next summer and breaks all records in that direction, despite the fact that I will, as I always do, point that out to them when it occurs. Their silence will be, as always, deafening, because anything that doesn't support their ideological beliefs is ignored or denied despite reality.

[PS: Just got back from driving my son to a friend's and saw trees that had crashed onto houses, down power lines, including just half a block from his old school, and only one lane of traffic on many streets because of the piles of branches etc. and to further make my point above, this kind of scene has become relatively common in the past few years and since I moved here a dozen years ago.]

HOW MUCH CLEARER CAN IT BE? PART TWO

2011-10-30T09:49:00.001-04:00

You have to watch the "Weathering Fights" clip from a recent Daily Show (here). It illustrates perfectly the glaringly anti-intellectual, anti-reason, anti-logic, anti-facts, anti-reality core of rightwing ideology as a Republican strategist confirms everything this blog has ever posted about rightwing ideology.

INDIAN WINTER?

2011-10-29T12:25:00.003-04:00

I'm back in The Berkshires again after several weeks and before the big snowstorm they're supposed to get here, there's already snow on roofs and in yards from several days ago.

When I was a kid and we had a warm spell in November they called it "Indian Summer"—so should below freezing weather and serious snowstorms in October be called "Indian Winter?"

Whatever it might be, it's worth it to get to see my oldest son, Miles, play bass in a Black Sabbath tribute band last night at the local pub/restaurant. With a giant screen on the small stage behind them projecting Godzilla fighting Mothra, and the band in costumes, the guitarist [Rob Sanzone] as "Buckethead" (Miles explained that's an actual guitarists' guitarist who plays ripping ax in various bands and wears a mask-with-a-bucket-on-his-head disguise, as the guitarist did last night).

Miles wore a long black wig and grew a Fu Manchu moustache to look like the original Black Sabbath bass player. The singer [Scott Bartzch]was dressed as a mummy for a taste of pre-Halloween. Some folks came dressed appropriately as well in costumes that Miles had to explain to me echoed various Black Sabbath songs.

I never dug heavy metal or death metal or any of the categories of metal except for some of the guitar hooks and riffs. I know there's some great musicianship in some heavy metal bands and even some great songwriting, complex and original in some cases. But I just can't get past the general assault aspects of the music that often drowns out any and all subtleties.

I came home with my ears ringing more than they do anyway, and feeling like the air pressure was off in there too. But, and it's a big but, I have to say the set I caught was totally exhilarating. Couldn't have asked for a better way to get the ya-ya's out. Rob, the guitarist, is always amazing, the drummer [Ben Schworm] was awesome, the singer nailed it and Miles held it all together (from my perspective of course) with a solid bass beat and sound.

My daughter-in-law invited several of my grandson's friends along and they crowded the area in front of the small stage bobbing their heads ala metal bands and fans while two aging obvious Black Sabbath fans with little or no hair to throw around still bopped to the music and sang along to all the lyrics with gestures and high fives and all.

There's so much talent in the world these days, maybe always has been, that almost anywhere I go I get to experience it in full bloom. Like last night. Back to Jersey tomorrow on what hopefully will be melted snow or plowed roads.

And as I write this my youngest, my grandson and one of those boys (six boys including my son and his nephew slept over last night, that was a trip) are playing guitar, bass and drums down in "the music room" of the little old mill-town house Miles and his wife rent and it couldn't be more cool. Ain't life grand when we let it be?

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN

2011-10-27T15:43:00.002-04:00

Unfortunately, the other night in Oakland was like a replay of a nighttime version of what happened in Berkeley during the "People's Park" protests in the Spring of 1969, when Reagan was governor and ordered the troops out to disperse people who had created a wonderful neighborhood park out of a piece of land the University of California owned but had been used for quite a while as an unauthorized parking lot.

Flowering plants and homemade see saws and sandboxes were too much for the rightwing conservatives to allow the hippie students to plant or build or make. Then and even more so now, corporate greed must be justified, even deified and certainly protected by force and corporate criminals given passes or excused or if incarcerated put into country club prisons. But citizens with no corporate power are to be treated as criminals and less than human.

To paraphrase what someone else said: History may not be repeating itself here, but it's certainly rhyming.

PS: I'm sure you've already heard and read about the Iraq War veteran shot above by an Oakland Police tear gas canister, but here's a less catastrophic yet still horrific photo of another victim:

ANOTHER LIST

2011-10-26T18:06:00.002-04:00

I still don't have any compulsion, or hardly even any desire, to write lists, since the brain surgery (where before I compulsively made them all day and night long). But I have become compulsive about listening to every song in my iTunes library alphabetically by title. Which led me to notice that those beginning with the word "Don't" make a very compelling list, even a poem if you leave out the "artists" and just read the titles.

Don't (Elvis)
Don't Answer The Door (B.B. King)
Don't Be Cruel (Elvis)
Don't Be That Way (Bing Crosby)
Don't Be That Way (The Kansas City Five live)
Don't Blame Me (Miles Davis)
Don't Blame Me (The Nat King Cole Trio)
Don't Bother Me (The Beatles)
Don't Bring Me Down (The Animals)
Don't Do Me Like That (Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers)
Don't Fence Me In (Bing & The Andrews Sisters)
Don't Fence Me In (David Byrne)
Don't Fence Me In (Frank Sinatra)
Don't Forget Tonight, Tomorrow (Sinatra)
Don't Go (Nat King Cole & George Shearing)
Don't Go To Nightclubs Anymore (Van Morrison)
Don't Know Why (Norah Jones)
Don't Let It Bring You Down (Neil Young)
Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight (James Taylor)
Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (The Animals)
Don't Like Goodbyes (Sinatra)
Don't Look Back (Luscious Jackson)
Don't Lose Your Cool (Scott Buck Trio)
Don't Make Me Over (Dionne Warwick)
Don't Pass Me By (The Beatles)
Don't Play That Song (Ben E. King)
Don't Put Your Finger In Yourself (The Tinklers)
Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (Glen Miller & His Orchestra)
Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough (Michael Jackson)
Don't Think Twice It's All Right (Dylan from "Freewheelin'")
Don't Think Twice It's All Right (Dylan live from the soundtrack to "No Direction Home")
Don't Turn Out Like Your Mother (The Proclaimers)
Don't Worry 'Bout That Mule (Louis Jordan)
Don't Worry About Tomorrow (Van Morrison)
Don't Worry Baby (The Beach Boys)
Don't You Believe It Dear (The Artie Shaw Orchestra w/ Mel Torme)
Don't You Know I Love You (The Clovers)
Don't You Miss Your Baby? (Count Basie)