The Sheila Variations: December 2009 Archives

December 31, 2009

Spreadin' the magic

Man, that was fast.

My story about the encounter at the Apple store is already listed on the left sidebar of the Apple Store news blog, under the heading "Other Apple News", and it's been given the title "Store Love Story".

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December 30, 2009

The magic Irish Apple

I went to the Apple store today in Chelsea to buy a new MacBook. My current MacBook is literally falling apart at the seams, and I am about to go off on my writing sabbatical, and need new hard (and soft) ware. I was meeting Jeremiah at 3, so I didn't have a ton of time, but I had enough time to comparison shop and chat and get what I needed. The first Apple store employee who came up to me in the cavernous echoey space was lovely, and actually talked me DOWN (pricewise) from my first choice. "If all you need it to do is this this and this, then you might as well get this ..." which was significantly lower. Yes. I do not need major bells and whistles. I need mega-space for all my writing, and mega-space for all my photos. He recommended the MacBook that I had originally been thinking of, and then we chatted for a bit about my cray-cray backup system, and he was awesome and helpful. I cannot remember his name. Forgive me, kind Apple store employee.

He then passed me off to another Apple guy, whose job it was to close the sale.

And here is where the magic comes in.

A word about magic. I do believe that it is all around us, at all times. You just have to be primed to recognize it while it is happening. It is tough to live in that space. Nearly impossible for me. Because if I accept the magic while it is happening, then that would mean that all of life, ALL of it, is a GIFT, right? Every single second ... is a gift from God ... and if I am so wrapped up in self and I miss it, then that is my fault, and I would just have to admit that in that moment I am rejecting God. And who needs that shit. It is hard to live in that space, is all I'm saying. It requires a constant awareness of the presence of God. If you say you always live there, then bully for you, but I find it challenging. But today ... after a rough ROUGH couple of days ... in the Apple store in Chelsea, I was primed. I was open, ready with questions, excited about my sabbatical, and (this is key) - I have already had a good experience (many times over) with Apple employees, so I was prepared to be open and receptive to their help. I am a loyal Mac user. I'm IN.

Brian had bright blue eyes and sandy hair, and a nice thick unmistakable Dublin accent. I didn't mention it right away, though. We launched right into our Mac conversation. Here is my challenge with Time Machine. Oh, well have you tried this, this might help. No, I haven't, I will. Thank you.

I told him what I needed. He was helpful and sweet. He was patient with my lack of technological know-how and made me feel like I could do and handle anything.

We discussed the backup system extensively. I told him I was about to go out of town for a bit, and wanted to get this handled before I left. Eventually he asked, "Where are you going?"

Our conversation went as follows:

"I'm going out to an island in the Atlantic Ocean for the month of January."

"Really!"

"Totally. For a writing sabbatical of sorts."

"Really!" (His eyes glowed. You know. The Irish and writers.)

"Yes!"

"Where, if I may ask?"

"It's a place called Block Island - it's off the coast of Rhode Island. It will be bleak and wintry"

"So you're doin' a sort of Samuel Beckett stark and isolated thing."

I guffawed. Happy as I could be. "Yes! Exactly!"

"So is it like a workshop with other artists or ..."

"Nope. Just me."

"How long are you goin' for?"

"30 days."

"That's enough time for a novel then, isn't it."

"Yes! That's the plan."

"Or a novella!"

By this point, we were laughing hysterically. "I must write a novella while I'm out there, you are quite right."

"Will there be other people or ..."

(Brian was very concerned.)

"There are year-round residents, yes. There's also a pub at the end of the block."

He lit up. "Well, now, that's all right."

"Exactly. I just hope I emerge from this month with my sanity intact."

With the Irish gift for keeping the conversational ball in the air, he said, "Maybe you'll write something like The Shining."

I burst out laughing. "Totally. I'll send home some pages and people will be like, 'Uhm, should we rescue Sheila or ... because these stories are effed up."

"I'm jealous of ya. It sounds wonderful."

All of this said as we waited for my MacBook (and accessories) to be brought up from the Willy Wonka bowels of the joint.

I decided to "go there". In my world, that means "trust in God". I knew what the result would be, I just needed to take the leap and accept the magic.

I said, "You're Irish."

"Yes. Dublin, born and raised."

"How long have you been here?"

"About two years."

I changed the subject, looking around at the sparsely populated (for Apple) store. "So the Christmas rush is done, ey?"

"You know, Sheila, to be honest with you ... I know the economy is supposed to be in the tank and everything ... but seriously, business has never been better.:

"Really?"

"I suppose people freaked out for a bit, but now ... you'd never know the difference. Thank God for short memories, right?"

"Really."

Again, pushing it into the personal. "Well, you guys have had a real economic boom, now, haven't you?" (by "you guys" I meant "the Irish", and I knew he would get it. The Irish always "get it". You never have to explain yourself twice to them. They listen on the level that I find satisfying. They understand conversation on a cellular level.)

He said, "Oh, yes. There was a great boom."

"I was there during the boom."

"Yes, but it's certainly tanked now."

"I've heard! You had people marching on government buildings and the like!"

"The problem was is that people just weren't prudent. They went crazy with the money."

"That's what I sensed the last time I was there."

"Yes - everyone had to have two cars - everyone had to have a vacation home in Eastern Europe somewhere ... and when the bottom dropped out, it was not pretty."

"Of course not!"

"I have had friends say to me, 'How did you have the foresight ...'"

I started laughing. "You got out!"

Brian said, "The funny thing is - is that I lived in Italy for four years - "

"Really!"

"Yes - so I really haven't lived in Ireland for quite some time ..."

"Well, I suppose the Irish do have a long history of living in exile."

"Well, you really have to, don't you?"

"True, true."

"So I never really participated in Ireland's boom - but I heard stories - everyone got so materialistic suddenly -"

"Yes, I really felt that the last time I was there ..."

"And of course the ones who were the least prudent were those in the government..."

"Naturally."

"Which is where all of those protests came from."

"Oh Jesus, of course."

Then Brian and I veered off into an in-depth and emotionally connected conversation about the AppleCare program, and all the benefits thereof.

Slight pause.

Me: (determined to commune with magic) "So you lived in Italy?"

"Yes, for four years."

"What was that like?"

"Oh God, I loved it. I really miss it. I speak Italian - and it was so hard for me to learn the language, but I did it, and I finally could relax with it ..."

"That is so awesome."

"I think that's what I miss most, speaking Italian every day. But the good thing is is that I am a designated Italian speaker --" (he showed me his badge, that had his name on it, and then below it it said "Benvenuto/Welcome".)

"That is so cool!"

"Yes!"

"So if someone comes here speaking only Italian --"

"I can help."

"But of course everyone speaks English here."

(again, with the ease and flow of Irish conversation, no struggling for power or right-ness): "Of course. It's New York, everyone speaks English here."

"Where did you live in Italy?"

"I lived in Milan for a year, which is ugly, but at least things work there."

"Meaning ..."

"The trams, the bureaucracy - things work there ... then I moved to Rome ..."

(remembering vaguely something about Italy): "Are there piles of garbage everywhere?"

"No, that's Naples."

"Oh, okay."

"Rome is so beautiful, the people are so nice, but nothing works."

"Explain."

"The bureaucracy is so annoying, it takes forever to get anything done ..."

"Oh, I see."

"To get your papers, to get permission to do anything ... and then ... just things like bus schedules, tram schedules ... nothing works ..."

"Yuk."

"But the way they live!!"

"I've heard!"

"They just don't care about working. It's so laidback, so casual ... everything is so relaxed ..."

"Marvelous."

"And to spend, like, every weekend at the beach ..."

"Glorious."

"Totally. The Italians know how to live."

At some point during this, all of my purchases arrived from the Willy Wonka bowels, and he went to enter all of my information in his offical Mac-store iPhone-thing they have, which basically means you don't need a damn cashier there, which is so freakin' awesome. I was spelling out my name for him, and he started laughing.

"Irish much?"

"Middle name is Kathleen."

"Oh, Jesus. Have you been there much?"

"A ton. My parents took us there as kids, and we basically lived like gypsies for a month."

"Ya did NOT."

"We did!"

"Where did you go?"

"Oh, all over the West mostly. It was nuts. Recently I went to Belfast for the first time."

He (typing in all my information): "What did ya think of it?"

"It was really interesting. I have a friend who lives there and she took me to the Starbucks. At first I didn't realize what a big deal it was that there was a Starbucks in Belfast - so I was like, 'Uhm, we're going to Starbucks??'" (he laughed - totally getting it) "... but when she explained it to me ..."

He started laughing. "Yes. You have to just go along with it. It's sweet. It's meaningful."

"Exactly. Knowing the MEANING of the Starbucks was very important - so we went there, and posed for pictures outside of it -" (he started laughing) "Totally proud that there was now a Starbucks in Belfast and what it meant. It was great. I loved Belfast."

My packages were all ready. I paid. I resisted the urge to propose marriage to Brian (I had been struggling with the urge since the Samuel Beckett comment); and the urge was 100% more intense when the following event occurred:

Brian handed me all of my packages.

"Thank you so much!"

"You are so welcome!"

"You have been SO helpful!"

"And like I said, with your One to One package, you can come in and get one on one tutorials and really sit with someone, go deep into these issues, to figure out what you need ..."

"I can't wait."

I was all set with my packages. I held out my hand to him.

"Brian. Thank you."

And Brian, my magic Irish Apple employee, took my hand, and said, in almost a declamatory manner (like: he took his moment): "Well, Sheila, as the Irish say, 'Go raibh an ghaoth go brách ag do chúl.  Go lonrai an ghrian go te ar d'aghaidh.'"

I felt my breath catch in my throat. He is speaking Irish to me? And I actually understand it? What the hell is happening? I'm in the Apple store!! Suddenly there was too much magic. Too much abundance. I couldn't capture any of it in my hands. It was here only for a minute, hold on to it, hold on to it, remember it, because it is about to be gone ... It is your responsibility to recognize it while it is happening. If you miss it, that's YOUR bad. But here. Here is the gift. Catch it if you can. That's God.

I knew what he had said, but didn't say a word, just grasped his hand tight - and Brian said, "That means, 'May the wind be always at your back, and may the sun shine warm upon your face.'"

Out of nowhere, I was in tears. I thought I might fall apart, and was horrified, but he saw my emotion and held my hand tighter.

"Best of luck to you with your writing sabbatical."

"Thank you, thank you ..."

I walked outside into the freezing sunshine, ready to walk cross-town to meet Jeremiah, and I felt like my heart had wings. It was too much. Too intense.

At that very moment, a raggedy dude with only three teeth in his head, wearing a huge beatup parka walked by me, through the throngs on that crowded sidewalk, and called out to me, specifically - and pointedly - he almost stopped in his tracks and said, right at me: "You beautiful!"

Thank you, sir.

I do not think the two events are unconnected.

It is almost the last day of this terrible year. Brian was a gift. From God.

Brian, if you're out there, if you can hear me:

Go n-éiri an bóther leat.
Go raibh an ghaoth go brách ag do chúl.
 Go lonrai an ghrian go te ar d'aghaidh.  
Go dtite an bhtháisteach go min ar do phtháirceanna.
 Agus go mbuailimid le chthéile aris, go gcoinni Dia i mbos A ltháimhe thú.

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"Nothing Sacred"; (1937), dir: William Wellman

Nothing Sacred has themes very familiar to present-day audiences, with its spoofing of celebrity culture and ridiculous fame-hungry journalists who participate in "human interest" stories, sometimes at the expense of truth, good taste, or logic. From 1937, starring the blonde goofball extraordinaire Carole Lombard and a grumpy cynical Fredric March (he's one of my favorites), Nothing Sacred tells the wacko story of a girl named Hazel Flagg (Lombard) from a small town in Vermont, who apparently is slowly being poisoned by "radion". Her bones are disintegrating. It is tragic, apparently. Except that she isn't really being poisoned by "radion" at all. It was some snafu on the part of her quack of a doctor who is a little bit too fond of the bottle. The doctor, played hilariously by Charles Winninger, is named "Enoch Downer". Hysterical.

The movie opens with a glittering gala dinner, hosted by the big New York City paper The Morning Star, honoring a "sultan" who is going to donate all of his Arabian millions to building a new complex of schools and auditoriums and libraries, all emblazoned with the name "The Morning Star". The "sultan" sits at the main table, swathed in robes and a turban, and he makes some bogus speech about how glorious it all is - before he is unmasked by his long-suffering wife and many children, who walk into the gala dinner, accompanied by a police officer, and the wife points him out, "That's my husband." So the sultan is a swindler. He's actually a shoe-shine man in Harlem. The Morning Star has been duped, and their top reporter, Fredric March, was the one who bought his story, hook line and sinker. It is a horrible embarrassment. To be taken in by such a hoax! Uhm, Jessica Lynch, anyone? There is nothing dated about any of this.

Fredric March, as punishment for the embarrassment of being taken in, is relegated to the obituary section of the paper, and we see him struggling to type out the obituaries, hemmed in by filing cabinets and water coolers and workmen hovering directly over him on ladders. It is a fall from grace. (Fredric March looks like a young Gene Kelly - anyone else notice that?) March is a newspaperman, cynical and jaded, but he's also (until the sultan debacle) very good at what he does. His reputation has been golden, and he takes a lot of pride in his work. He sees a buried story in the newspaper, about a girl dying of "radion poisoning" in Vermont, and wonders why the paper isn't covering it more prominently. Wouldn't this be a good human interest tale? Doesn't such a story have all the earmarks of a slamdunk?

Nothing Sacred is, make no mistake, a screwball comedy, and there were times when I found myself laughing out loud, and had to pause the movie to get it all out. But on a deeper level, it's an indictment, in a way, of the kind of journalism that uses up people - that makes heroes out of people whose only "gift" is that they suffer - and then, just as quickly - drop them like hot potatoes when the novelty has worn off. Fredric March fully participates in that part of his profession. It is his bread and butter. He hears about this suffering girl, sees her picture in the paper, sees how pretty she is, and wheels start spinning in his head. Couldn't he turn her into some kind of symbol? Of perseverence, of goodness, of dignity while suffering? It's contemptible, his profession, but he's so engrossed in it he doesn't know it. He decides to try to use her to save his own flagging career.

He takes a trip up to Vermont to track down Miss Flagg. It's a small town, uppity and judgmental. The second person he meets is Margaret Hamilton, sitting in a general store, rocking in a rocking chair, knitting, and not giving him the time of day. Everyone can tell that he's not "from 'round these parts", and the second he starts asking about where he can find Hazel Flagg they know he's a newspaperman, and nobody wants anything to do with him. Finally, we meet Miss Flagg, the radiant and spectacularly gorgeous Carole Lombard (she, like Marilyn Monroe, would look fantastic in a potato sack), who manages to make every single thing she does funny. Without ever mugging or seeming to reach for it. Her sensibility is inherently funny. As Mitchell wrote: "gorgeous and goofy - a killer combo". Indeed.

Judging from the stories of those who knew her, she was just as funny in person. Howard Hawks describes watching her, an up-and-coming starlet, at a party after "she had a few drinks in her", and he watched how hilarious she was, how free and goofy - one of the boys, swore like a truck-driver - yet looked like THAT. He never forgot it, and came to her when he had a project ready for her (Twentieth Century). A tragically short career, although who knows what would have happened to such goofiness at that time, when women were so much relegated to the sidelines after their heyday of youth. Meryl Streep's career now would be more appropriate to someone like Lombard, who just would have gotten better and more interesting as an old dame ... but sadly, that was not in the cards. First of all, because of how the industry was set up then - who knows how she would have survived the 50s, where would she fit in there? - but also because she died so young.

What a shame.

She had it all.

She sits in the doctor's office, weeping about how she is being poisoned, and she manages to make the entire thing hilarious. She is funniest when she cries (I am thinking now of the brilliant "Carlo turns into a gorilla" scene in My Man Godfrey - which is funny because of all the shenanigans of Carlo, of course, and the shrieking laughter of her grotesque mother, but it's also funny because the crazier Carlo gets, the harder she cries).

Her doctor informs her that no, she is not dying. Lombard's response is classic screwball. She had been let go of her job at the factory due to her illness, and they were going to give her a big severance. She was going to use that severance to take a trip to New York City, see all the sights, live it up, and then be able to die happy. So now that she was going to live, all of this is a tragedy. Will she not get to go to New York now? Can her doctor please NOT inform the factory that she is NOT ill, so that she can still get her severance? "I know it's not ethical ..." she sobs. Uhm, no, it's NOT. Into the middle of this strolls Fredric March, wanting to interview her about her impending death, and also (drumroll) fly her to New York, to show her the sights, and introduce her around. "New York will love you!" he tells her, his ulterior motive all over him. She's his ticket to journalistic fame and redemption!

Everyone's got an angle in Nothing Sacred (which you can tell just from the title of the picture). Lombard wants to get to New York, and is willing to pretend she is still dying in order for that to happen. March wants to make his name as a journalist and redeem himself from the sultan hoax, so he offers Lombard the moon, talking about how much hope she will give to others. And Hazel's doctor, the always slightly drunk Enoch Downer, has been holding a grudge against The Morning Star for twenty years, because he didn't win the contest sponsored by the newspaper to a reader writing in on "The 5 Greatest Americans". He is looking for any way he can to finally stick it to The Star, who rejected his brilliant work. He decides to keep up the farce, that Hazel Flagg is dying, so that he can keep the fancy-pantsy newspaperman in thrall, until finally - the hoax will be revealed, to the ruination of all. Enoch Downer will get his revenge.

The three schemers all set off to New York. Once there Fredric March goes to work, writing piece after piece about the bravery of poor miss Hazel Flagg, and Hazel Flagg finds herself a celebrity. She goes everywhere, sees everyone. Wellman does a very funny montage sequence, where you can see the effect Hazel Flagg's presence has had on New York. A chalkboard outside a restaurant that would normally announce the specials now reads: "HAZEL FLAGG DINED HERE TODAY". There's a shot of a tousled man in a study, hovering over a pad of paper, and then you see the newspaper headline: "GREAT POET FINDS INSPIRATION FOR HIS BEST POEM IN THE STORY OF HAZEL FLAGG". You see her name on billboards at nightclubs, saying they welcomed her to the show that night. She goes to a wrestling match at Madison Square Garden and the referee stops the entire match to ask for "10 seconds of silence" for Hazel Flagg. The two sweaty wrestlers let go of each other, and stand there obediently, heads bowed. Then there's a funny footnote to the montage, where a newspaper, showing yet another front-page story about Hazel Flagg, is used to wrap up a stinky dead fish at the Fulton Fish Market, and a plump grumpy hausfrau, completely uninterested in the story, grabs the wrapped-up fish and walks off. So down on the ground life goes on. But up in the glittering elite world, Hazel Flagg becomes a hero. She makes everyone feel good about themselves. They get to be charitable, humane, they get to show how much they FEEL things (women breaking into sobs during a random speech that mention Hazel Flagg's name), how much compassion they have, how selfless, how open-hearted ... It's all a big display, meaningless at the center of it, but quite compelling on the surface. If you weren't cynical, you might be fooled.

Hazel Flagg, at first, is swept away by it all, by her newfound celebrity. She loves being loved, it's amazing to her that people want to take her picture, that she shows up at a play and the director comes out before the curtain rises to welcome their "very special guest". But slowly, the bloom wears off the rose. Her deception begins to eat away at her. She feels awful. All of these people, weeping over how sick she is, how brave, are all being fooled. What will they think of her when they find out? How will she get out of it? Should she fake her own death and then just disappear? She can't live with it.

There is a very funny scene in a nightclub, where, of course, she is welcomed, by name, before the show begins. The speech given about her is maudlin, over-emotional, and pathetic. How wonderful it is to give the poor dying girl a few laughs before she slips off this mortal coil. How magnanimous we all are! A waiter comes over to the nightclub table to refill Hazel's drink, and, as he pours the drink, you see that he, too, is in tears. He slowly pours her drink, sniffling above her. Lombard is so over it. She wanted to come to New York to have a good time. But everyone is so sad at just the sight of her, it has all become too morose. Not to mention the fact that she is healthy as a horse, and not dying at all. The concern of the masses is unbearable to her because it is all based on a lie.

Things grow more complex when it becomes apparent that Fredric March, against his journalistic creed, is falling in love with her. And she with him. He believes he is falling in love with a pretty woman who doesn't have much time left. She knows she is falling in love with a man who doesn't know the truth about her.

Oh, what will she do??

Lombard begins to disintegrate emotionally. I guffawed watching it. She gets very drunk at a nightclub show one night, hiccuping, and smiling giddily (and emptily) at the crowds who adore her. She lies in bed with her hangover, sipping on raw eggs, ice pack on her head, and I just want to hug her, she's so funny. She's devastated. She wants to come clean. But her "downer" of a doctor insists she keep up the charade, so that he can get even with the paper that so humiliated him many years before.

Fredric March, more in love every day, decides to call in a Viennese specialist on "radion poisoning" so that she can get a second opinion. Carole Lombard's face when she hears that ... there's so much going on there, and it all battles it out on her beautiful face. Shouldn't she, if she were really near death, be grateful for such a gesture? But all you can see is the flickering trapped panic of a woman who knows that the second that specialist takes a look at her he will realize that she isn't sick at all.

There's a scene where she and Fredric March get into a fist fight in her room. Yes, an actual fist fight. She flails at him wildly, missing him at every turn. This is all done in one take. The glory of the movies back then, which didn't rely too much on closeup or quick cuts. We get to see these two actors basically dance around one another, fighting, pushing, ducking, weaving ... Carole Lombard is in a silky negligee which makes it even funnier. Finally, he does punch her, right on the jaw. (He has ulterior motives, of course, which I won't get into - avoiding spoilers). After his fist lands on her face, she stands there, unmoving, head thrown back, stunned by the blow. You can see him staring at her, quizzically, waiting. Carole Lombard's mouth is moving. Nonsense words. Brilliant physical comedy. Finally, he gives her a gentle tap, and she falls back on the bed, straight as a board. I had to watch it three times in a row.

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She's so easy with herself, her talent just FLOWS out of her. Nothing worse than someone trying to be funny. She never has to try. She stands there with tears glimmering in her eyes, flickers of guilt and shame going across her face, and it is automatically funny. Lombard was a genius that way.

I won't give away the ending of Nothing Sacred, but I will say that it has a symmetry to it that is so satisfying. Lombard and March are so great together, wonderful sparring partners, and the goofball atmosphere of the entire picture makes it a comedic treasure trove. Every single person who enters, no matter how small a part, is in some way, off their rocker. Lombard tries, desperately, to have SOME sort of moral compass, but the attraction of the big city life is too much for her, and she gets sucked into her own deception with far more completeness than she could have ever dreamed. How will it work out? How will she get out of it?

The fun of Carole Lombard is to watch her deal with a big fat mess. She's best when she is navigating chaos, most of which is of her own making. She shines when everything is out of her control. It suited her manic humor, her highly-tuned sense of the absurd.

Nothing Sacred is fun from beginning to end.

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Today in history: December 30, 1865

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India.

Michael Schmidt, in his wonderful book Lives of the Poets writes:

In Kipling as in Hardy we find a poetry from the turn of the century without traces of poetic weariness, without the rhythmic overemphasis of Swinburne, the esoteric qualities of Arthur Symons, or the twilight of early Yeats. He was a plain-speaking poet, nowhere more pithily than in his "Epitaphs of the War". These brief, uncompromising last words illustrate his skill in poetry of summary declaration, tough yet humane. "The Coward" is the best of them: "I could not look on death, which being known, / Men took me to him, blindfold and alone." His most famous epitaph has the same epigrammatic conciseness; few talents of this century have been given to epigram, a form more difficult to master - for it demands pure content and direct expression - than discursive forms. "If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied."

That is awfully chilly good stuff.

T.S. Eliot said that there is little difference in Kipling's use of language between his prose and his verse. It is his greatest strength, and what sets him apart.

The great Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote in her journal about Barrack-Room Ballads:

"They are capital -- full of virile strength and life. They thrill and pulsate and burn, they carry you along in their rush and swing, till you forget your own petty interests and cares, and burst out into a broader soul-world ... We can never be quite so narrow again."

I love that. "They thrill and pulsate and burn, they carry you along in their rush and swing ..."

That is pretty much my experience of him as well.

I'm a Kipling fan from way back, from childhood. It was the cartoon version of Rikki Tikki Tavi, shown on television back then, that did me in completely. I saw it when I was, what, 8 years old? I remember it vividly and I LIVED it. Narrated by Orson Welles!

Kipling is good for kids. I took his stuff out of the library and read some of it. I liked the adventure of it, the exotic setting ... and I also loved books about animals. So with Rikki Tikki Tavi I was all set. The story opens:

This is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed, through the bath-rooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment. Darzee, the tailor-bird, helped him, and Chuchundra, the musk-rat, who never comes out into the middle of the floor, but always creeps round by the wall, gave him advice; but Rikki-tikki did the real fighting.
He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and habits. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink; he could scratch himself anywhere he pleased, with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use; he could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bottle-brush, and his war-cry, as he scuttled through the long grass, was: '_Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!_'

How could you NOT keep reading after such an opening? Even now, re-reading that, it makes me want to pick it up again!

I was haunted by the image of the bird PRETENDING to be wounded in order to lure Nagaina the cobra-wife away from her eggs. I was so frightened by that! I wondered if I would have the courage to behave in such a way if I needed to.

Kipling's controversial nature went right over my head as a child and I just loved the stories and the beat of the poems, which reminded me of Longfellow ("hardly a man is now alive who remembers that day and year"). It is compulsively readable stuff. His verse has, what Michael Schmidt calls "metrical drubbing", a drumbeat that forces you to continue, a rat-a-tat-tat of sound. There is much that is distasteful in Kipling's views but to throw him out completely because of that is a shame. I feel sorry for those who feel that way because God what joy they miss! Now, on the flipside, if I walk into your room and find that you have a shrine to Oliver Cromwell on your dresser, then yeah, I will flag you as a nutbag and I will think badly of you. We all have our limits. Kipling's views on Irish independence suck, and obviously I have strong feelings about that issue. But Kipling is a WRITER. He was also a man of his time. As we all are "of our time". Shakespeare was of his time. Yeah, let's just write him off, too, because he doesn't line up with our precious 21st century way of thinking. Yes, Kipling shilled for Empire. So? Every Empire should have such a talented shill!

Orwell's essay on Kipling is not to be missed - and Christopher Hitchens (the heir of Orwell) has also written quite a bit on Kipling. All very interesting stuff for Kipling lovers. It's not about turning a blind eye to the more unsavory aspects of the world Kipling describes. It's about appreciating his talent as a story-teller, first of all, and putting him in the correct context. At least that's what it's about for me.

Besides, anyone who captivated my imagination from before the age of 8 has a "forever" place in my heart because ... well, you never forget those people who sweep you away before you really know who you are, before you worry about things like context and controversy ... when you just like what you like because you like it. It's that simple.

In the end, there are just the stories. The stories remain. You could say to me, "Yeah, but did you know that Kipling did THIS such-and-such awful thing?" Yeah, I know it. But have you read those poems? Have you read the stories?

Both can be true. Both ARE true. I am able to hold more than one idea in my brain at a time, thank Christ, and contradictory opinions do not need to be resolved. SOME do, but not ones like the one I describe. Not for me, anyway. Lots of my favorite writers held views I think abhorrent. So? What am I, the arbiter of morality? Besides, I'd rather not miss out on something WONDERFUL. And I think Kipling is wonderful.

Kipling's work clamors with voices. Shouts, catcalls, different dialects ... You can feel the dust and heat of India in them, the cacophony of accents, the world ... These are not poems in quiet isolation. They rustle, rumble, jostle for position ... Kipling has his ear to the ground.

I will also always love Kipling for the following line, which I would actually remember on occasion in high school, when I felt insecure about not being like other people, or not wanting to go along with the pack ... I had read the story when I was a kid, and it struck a nerve, and these words would come back to me. Actually, they still do. I really find them comforting. They are from Kipling's story "The Cat That Walked By Himself."

The Cat. He walked by himself. He went through the wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail, and walking by his wild lone.

I think that is marvelous. So it helped explain me to myself. Not that I didn't have friends - I had the best friends! - but to see myself as the cat who "walked by himself" as opposed to some FREAK who didn't want to drink or have sex or the other things going on in high school ... it was really helpful. I am just "walking by my wild lone", and that's my nature. It's okay. It's okay.

Some quotes:

Michael Schmidt, from Lives of the Poets:

His father was a talented teacher of sculpture at the Bombay School of Art and later curator of the museum at Lahore, responsive to the rich multitude of cultures in which he and his family lived. His mother was sister of Lady Burne-Jones and of Stanley Baldwin's mother. Thus one of his backgrounds was intellectually lively and socially privileged. The other shared in different and older cultures. India in his early years was real to him, not as something inferior or dominated but as something mysterious and compelling. It helped constitute his imagination and memory. As a young child he was under the care of an Indian nurse, and he became proficient in Hindustani as well as English. When as a little sahib he returned to England with his sister, he stood at an awkward angle to the colonial world; the country he came to lacked the warmth, color and easy intimacy of the one he had left. When he returned to India as a young man, he had changed, but it was India that seemed different, no longer second nature to him. He invests much of his writing in reclaiming the first India for himself, and for others - children and adults.

Schmidt posits that the driving theme of Kipling's work is nostalgia. Nostalgia for a lost land, for childhood itself.

Schmidt writes:

The light verse he wrote for newspapers was collected in Departmental Ditties (1886), a book that reached an English audience. But it was Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) that made a real mark in England and paved the way for the writer's return. He arrived in London in 1889 with a reputation. He was feted by editors and fellow writers but generally stood apart, a plain man among the literati, preferring the company of men of action, of public deeds - Stanley Baldwin, Lord Milner, Max Aitken (who became Lord Beaverbrook). This was the period of his greatest popularity. Until 1902 he was the most eloquent literary spokesman for a Tory populism that was patriotic, imperial and - above all - responsible. The privileges of being English entailed real duties, duties that were imperatives.
When we say he was popular, we can quantify what we mean. By 1918, Departmental Ditties, his least achieved book, had sold 81,000 copies; by 1931 it had sold 117,000 copies. Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses remained his most opular book, selling 182,000 copies by 1918 and 255,000 by 1931. The Definitive Edition of the poems, published in 1940, had gone through sixty impressions by 1982. Like Houseman, even when his shares were no longer quoted on the intellectual bourse, and critics turned their backs on him, he remained popular with readers.

December 29, 2009

The beach in winter

One freezing dusk. Snow on the beach, a very odd and beautiful sight.

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Lucy's foot

The continuing saga. Here, she takes a Damon Runyon approach.

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Today in history: December 29, 1989

Vaclav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia after 40 years of Soviet Communist rule.

Havel, a playwright, spent a ton of time in jail for his political writings, and his philosophy was that, yes, he lived in an un-free society - but he would behave as if he were free. The magic "as if", so much a theatrical term, used to describe the mystery of the creative process of actors (act "as if" you were such and such) - and so of course, he, a man of the theatre, would use the "as if" as a way to survive oppression. He did not buckle down. He did not compromise. He acted "as if" he were living in a free society, and drove the authorities slowly insane.

Therefore: the years of arrests, suppression, censorship - the years where he was far more famous outside of his own country - because we in the world got to see and read his plays while his own countrymen were not allowed to. But Vaclav Havel, a hero, continued to behave as if he were free. He did not internalize the censorship and oppression from without. It did not become him. He remained outside of it.

If you think that's an easy thing to accomplish, then you don't know your history.

Vaclav Havel wrote once:

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

In this great and detailed piece on him in The New Yorker David Remnick describes the giddy days of the "velvet revolution", and I love the parts about Havel becoming President, and basically stage-managing the whole thing. What were the costumes? He wanted to eradicate the symbols of oppression. He loved going into "the castle" and discovering what was behind all the secret doors (much like the false front of stage sets, with a cavernous scene shop behind):

During the uprising, which quickly became known as the Velvet Revolution, and for a while afterward, there were graffiti around town proclaiming, "Havel je král"—"Havel Is King." The King tried to demystify his Castle. He ordered the costume designer for the movie "Amadeus" to create red-white-and-blue uniforms for the palace guards. (Communist-era guards wore khaki.) He himself at first refused the suits that his friend Prince Karel Schwarzenberg brought him. "I can't wear any of these!" Havel said. "I'd look like a gigolo." In jeans and sweater, he rode a scooter through the Castle halls. He threw a "festival of democracy" in the courtyards, with jugglers and mimes performing while he wandered around drinking Pilsner and greeting everyone. Later on, when he discovered that the chandeliers in the gilded Spanish Hall were outmoded, a couple of typical visitors, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, paid for new fixtures. For weeks, he drove his staff crazy as he monkeyed around with the remote control, dimming the lights, then brightening them again.
"When I first came here, there were many things that I found absurd," Havel told me in his office. A sly, can-youbelieve-it smile creased his face. "For example, it seemed to us on the first day that there were three rooms, close to where we're sitting now, which you couldn't enter. When we finally got inside, we discovered a kind of communications facility for contacts within the Warsaw Pact. So we took advantage of that and sent a New Year's greeting to Mikhail Gorbachev. Later, I heard from confidential sources that the K.G.B. chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, didn't really appreciate the fact that we'd found those facilities."

It's a fascinating examination of his years as President. What a journey.

Ivan Klima writes of Havel this is from an essay in his wonderful book about the revolution in Czechoslovakia - the book is called The Spirit of Prague:

Totalitarianism correctly understood the threat this cultural resistance posed, but the nature of that power ruled out any accommodation or compromise. It continued to battle against literature. It raided private flats and detained people who had gathered there to listen to lectures or the reading of a play or something as innocent as lyric poetry. It confiscated manuscripts from poets, prose writers and philosophers, both local and translated works, just as it did documents from Charter 77. From time to time it held trials in which judgement was passed on those who copied texts or organized other kinds of cultural activitiy. Because these people were clearly innocent, even according to the laws in force, the outcome of these trials were the opposite of what the authorities intended. They were meant to intimidate, but they succeeded only in unmasking power, in revealing it for the unprincipled, prejudiced and philistine force it was. This merely stiffened people's resistance. Early samizdat publications came out in tiny editions of tens of copies; by the eighties, books were being reproduced in many workshops, the technology of reproduction was modernized, and the number of titles mushroomed. (The literary samizdat enterprise Padlock Editions published three hundred titles.) In the seventies, there were practically no samizdat cultural journals; by the eighties, there were more than a hundred unofficial magazines. (At the same time, there were only five official magazines dealing with culture.)
Sasmizdat literature was only one of the ways in which the repressed culture expressed itself. There were seminars in philosophy, and lecture series were held on different areas of the humanities. Young people frequently tried to distance themselves entirely from the pseudo-culture offered to them by the authorities. They founded small theatres, and from the seventies on, the most authentic expression of their relationship to the ruling system was the protest song. Singers who were closest to them in age and attitude became their idols. The authorities reacted predictably, and one generation of protest singers was essentially driven into exile, but as usual, the results were the opposite of what was intended.

By the late eighties, the international situation was undoubtedly influential. Those who represented power and those who represented culture were clearly squared off against each other. Several events also sharpened the conflict between the authorities and those who were trying to extricate themselves from their toils. The authorities frequently used police brutality to break up memorial assemblies to commemorate the country's national holiday or the memory of Jan Palach, a student who had set fire to himself, and died, in protest against the Soviet invasion. Those who came to pay their respects to a person who symbolized the possibility of individual protest taken to its furthest extreme became the object of a violent attack by special units who used truncheons, water-cannons, and tear-gas. People, mostly the young, decided not to give way to violence. For five consecutive days the peaceful assemblies were repeated, and on four occasions the police used violence to break them up. Several people were arrested, Vaclav Havel among them. During these events, which aroused the emotions of the whole country, the cruel truth about power was publicly revealed for the first time. At this critical juncture, the government could not find a single person with sufficient authority to address the nation. No one was willing to give public support to the regime, but many could be found to protest against police brutality, against imprisoning the innocent. Among the protestors were actors, filmmakers, and writers who, until then, the regime had believed to be "on its side".

In this critical situation, the authorities -- and it is hard to say whether this was out of stupidity or desperation or arrogance, or the awareness that they were indeed indelibly tarnished -- refused all invitations by the cultural opposition to take part in a dialogue. The deep chasm between totalitarian power and all the "shaken", to use Patocka's term, became unbridgeable. It was clear that any further error, any further act of arrogance, might be fatal.

What happened in November 1989 is well known. As an eyewitness and a participant, I wish to emphasize that this revolution, which really was the outcome of a clash between culture and pwoer, was the most non-violent revolution imaginable. In the mass meetings attended by up to three-quarters of a million people, no one was hurt, not a window was broken, not a car damaged. Many of the tens of thousands of pamphlets that flooded Prague and other cities and towns urged people to peaceful, tolerant action; not one called for violence. For those who still believe in the power of culture, the power of words, of good and of love, and their dominance over violence, who believe that neither the poet nor Archimedes, in their struggle against the man in uniform, are beaten before they begin, the Prague revolution must have been an inspiration.

Vaclav Havel wrote:

People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being.

He was not universally loved. There were many elements of society that abhorred him. His views were too pure, in many respects, and he refused to play the game. He continued to live "as if", even as President. He is an idealist. He has a great sense of the absurd. Not just from living in a schizophrenic political culture for most of his life, where the dictates of the Politburo were official policy, and the energy on the ground was a very different thing - although that is definitely a huge part of his emotional makeup. Totalitarian governments are masters at creating schizophrenic populaces, where to live divided from oneself is not only expedient, but necessary for survival. But Havel's sense of the absurd comes from the theatre as well, and its long history of non-literal abstract ways of looking at truth. He is in line with Ionesco, not Ibsen. Much of what was unforgivable to some in the velvet revolution was its insistence on humor, levity, and mockery. Nobody likes to be laughed at. I would also say that perhaps governments would prefer to be shot at and fought - because that validates their power inherently - rather than laughed at and mocked. If you are so little, so meaningless, that a population LAUGHS at your blustering assumptions of power, then what does that mean? Where does power reside? Just because you SAY you are powerful? Havel, and his Civic Forum, and all of the protesters in the velvet revolution basically refused to recognize the power structure anymore. They didn't accept the version of truth being handed to them. They laughed at it.

Ivan Klima writes:

The Prague of past eras is gone. No one can bring the murdered back to life, and most of those who were driven out will probably never return to the city. Nevertheless Prague has survived and has, finally, tasted freedom again. Its spirit is intact as well. This manifested itself vividly during the revolution that opened the way to freedom in 1989. Revolutions are usually marked by high-sounding slogans and flags; blood flows, or at least glass is shattered and stones fly.
The November revolution, which earned the epithet "velvet", differed from other revolutions not only in its peacefulness, but also in the main weapon used in the struggle. It was ridicule. Almost every available space in Prague -- the walls of the buildings, the subway stations, the windows of buses and streetcars, shop windows, lampposts, even statues and monuments -- were covered, in the space of a few days, with an unbelievable number of signs and posters. Although the slogans had a single object -- to overthrow the dictatorship -- their tone was light, ironic. The citizens of Prague delivered the coup de grace to their despised rulers not with a sword, but with a joke. Yet at the heart of this original, unemotional style of struggle there dwelt a stunning passion. It was the most recent and perhaps the most remarkable paradox to date in the life of this remarkable city.

Havel was the undisputed leader of all of this. He had been prepared, over a lifetime of persecution, for the position. His plays had made him famous. He lived in oppression in his own land (similar to the film directors in Iran today, whose works are lauded the world over, but who cannot get a screening of their own films in their own country). But again, these Iranian artists are on a similar path, and if you watch the movies of, say, Jafar Panahi, it becomes totally clear that he is living "as if" he were free. He is making movies "as if" the mullahs were not in charge. He has suffered a huge price for that. But that does not stop him. He has said that his films, hopefully, will be documents to future generations, generations who hopefully will not have to live under such oppression. He hopes that his films will be representations of "how we lived then". He is an heir of Havel, although his works have more of a gritty realistic docu-drama feel than Havel's plays. Regimes cannot stand to be ignored. Who are you to continue doing what you want without my stamp of approval? Human beings are extraordinary creatures. We can learn a lot from people like Havel, Panahi.

Ivan Klima, again, on Vaclav Havel:

Havel's candidacy for president and his later election were, in the first place, an expression of the precipitate, truly revolutionary course of events in this country. When I was returning from a meeting of one of the committees of Civic Forum [the organization Havel formed in November, 1989, to investigate police brutality] one day towards the end of November, my friends and I were saying to each other that the time was near when we should nominate our candidate for the office of president. We agreed then that the only candidate to consider, for he enjoyed the relatively wide support of the public, was Alexander Dubcek. But it became clear a few days later that the revolution had gone beyond the point where any candidate who was connected, if only by his past, with the Communist Party, was acceptable to the younger generation of Czechs.
At that moment the only suitable candidate emerged -- Vaclav Havel.

To a certain sector of the Czech public, Havel was, indeed, more or less unknown, or known as the son of a rich capitalist, even as a convict, but the revolutionary ethos that seized the nation brought about a change of attitude. In a certain atmosphere, in the midst of a crowd, however civil and restrained, an individual suddenly identifies himself with the prevailing mood and state of mind, and captures the crowd's enthusiasm. It's true that the majority of the country shared in the doings of the former system, but it's also true that the majority hated it just because it had made them complicit in its awfulness, and hardly anyone still identified himself with that regime which had so often humiliated, deceived and cheated them.

Within a few days, Havel became the symbol of revolutionary change, the man who would lead society out of its crisis.

No pressure or anything.

In November, of 1989, as everywhere the Communist edifice began to crack, Czechoslovakia was given a warning. The government at the time was a hard-line Communist one, and the memories of the 1968 Prague Spring were still fresh. The upheaval in Eastern Europe was like a brush-fire, and those in power in Czechoslovakia wanted to make sure it didn't spread. Amazing how quickly these events took place. Breathtaking, really. In the second week of November, 1989, Czechoslovakia was warned by the USSR to keep its people under control. By December 29, 1989, this day in history, Vaclav Havel was the first freely elected democratic president of the nation. A month and a half. Wow.

On November 15, R.W. Apple, Jr. reported in The New York Times about the situation in Prague:

According to reports circulating in party circles, Moscow cautioned Prague not to make the same mistakes made by Communist traditionalists elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Excessive caution or half-heartedness in putting political changes into effec, the Soviets are reported to have said, could lead to an uprising like the one that forced sweeping changes in East Germany.
The present Czechoslovak leadership descends from the one that was installed by the Soviets 21 years ago, at a time when the Brezhnev doctrine, since renounced by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, sanctioned intervention by one Communist country in the internal affairs of another if necessary to prevent heresy.

A senior adviser to one Czech minister said that the message was similar to one sent to Bulgaria, which apparently helped to persuade Todor I. Zhivkov, that country's longtime party leader, that it was time to retire.

Later in the same article, Havel is mentioned:

Slowly, a party member familiar with the situation said the heretofor quiescent Parliament is moving - "not the way the Polish or the Hungarian Parliament has moved, toward real coalition government, not from black to white, not too far or fast, not everyone at once, but slowly and surely from black to dark gray."
What that might mean in terms of political change is not clear. Mr. Jakes has already made concessions on travel, cultural issues and religion, but he has yielded nothing to the dissidents, such as the playwright Vaclav Havel, and indeed has cracked down even harder on demonstrators and others who make their dissatisfaction public.

Mr. Havel, one of the original signers of the Charter 77 manifesto, was arrested last January and released in May after serving half his sentence. His trial helped him to become, like Lech Walesa in Poland, a powerful symbol of the opposition. But he is still seen here as more a moral force than a man likely to form a governement.

"I think of him in terms of Jan Hus," said a Czechoslovak journalist, referring to the fifteenth-century church reformer who remains a national hero. "But maybe he has capacities we don't know about. Maybe he can someday become what he isn't yet - the leader of a mass movement, like Walesa, or like Tomas Masaryk, come to that."

In mid-November, as the events in East Germany were astonishing the world, Jiri Dienstbier, former Communist Party member, longtime protestor, and one of the founders of the human rights organization Charter 77, was interviewed in Czechoslovakia by The New York Times. At the time of the interview, Mr. Dienstbier was working in a hospital, stoking coal. His low-level job was punishment for his protests. A month later, he was foreign minister in Havel's government.

Dienstbier was asked about the events in East Germany:

"What surprised everybody was the quick unraveling of thingsin East Germany. The opposition there wasn't very muc bigger than in Czechoslovakia, which is pretty small. It was based almost completely on the evangelical church. In fact the East German movement started outside the country, with the opening of the border between Austria and Hungary, which gave the Germans an escape route. This shows that no matter where the rot sets in, the Communist system collapses very quickly.
"The next step? I hope it's Czechoslovakia. I think it could be. The leadership here is dead, only waiting to be carried away. Jakes is completely discredited. The party's only alternative to the status quo is to open up the system, but they know that once they open it up, they are doomed."

Ivan Klima on the 1989 velvet revolution:

The authorities frequently used police brutality to break up memorial assemblies to commemorate the country's national holiday or the memory of Jan Palach ... Those who came to pay their respects to a person who symbolized the possibility of individual protest taken to its furthest extreme became the object of a violent attack by special units who used truncheons, water-cannons and tear-gas. People, mostly the young, decided not to give way to violence.
For 5 consecutive days the peaceful assemblies were repeated, and on four occasions the police used violence to break them up. Several people were arrested, Vaclav Havel among them.

During these events, which aroused the emotions of the whole country, the cruel truth about power was publicly revealed for the first time. At this critical juncture, the government could not find a single person with sufficient authority to address the nation. No one was willing to give public support to the regime, but many could be found to protest against police brutality, against imprisoning the innocent. Among the protestors were actors, filmmakers, and writers who, until then, the regime had believed to be on "its side".

In this critical situation, the authorities -- and it is hard to say whether this was out of stupidity or desperation or arrogance, or the awareness that they were indeed indelibly tarnished -- refused all invitations by the cultural opposition to take part in a dialogue. The deep chasm between totalitarian power and all the "shaken", to use Patocka's term, became unbridgeable. It was clear that any further error, any further act of arrogance, might be fatal.

What happened in November 1989 is well known. As an eyewitness and a participant, I wish to emphasize that this revoltuion, which really was the outcome of a clash between culture and power, was the most non-violent revolution imaginable. In the mass meetings attended by up to three-quarters of a million people, no one was hurt, not a window was broken, not a car damaged. Many of the tens of thousands of pamphlets that flooded Prague and other cities and towns urged people to peaceful, tolerant action; not one called for ciolence. For those who still believe in the power of culture, the power of words, of good and of love, and their dominance over violence, who believe that neither the poet nor Archimedes, in their struggle against the man in uniform, are beaten before they begin, the Prague revolution must have been an inspiration.

On November 20, 1989, the mass protests began. John Tagliabue reported from Prague in The New York Times:

More than 200,000 marchers called today for freedom and a change in government in the largest and most vociferous public demonstration since the euphoric Prague Spring that preceded the Soviet-led invasion of Czechslovakia.
At the same time, party and Government officials pointedly reaffirmed their opposition to introducing political change in the face of the protests ...

The demonstrators, most of them young people, gathered initially at Wenceslas Square, the half-mile-long pedestrian plaza sloping down from the National Museum. The square has repeatedly been the forum for expressions of Czechoslovak nationalism. And today, the crowd waved flags and changed anti-Government slogans.

As the group, which included striking university and high school students, set out to cross the Vltava River on the way to Hradcany Castle, which houses the President's office, their shouts became bolder. Cries demanding "freedom" and "free elections" mingled with calls for a general strike and chants of "Jakes out!," a reference to the country's orthodox Communist Party General Secretary, Milos Jakes.

The gigantic crowd moved slowly through the narrow, curving streets of the baroque city. But as the marchers headed onto several bridges, they were confronted by large numbers of heavily armed police officers. The protesters reversed course and dispersed soon after they returned to the north shore, avoiding the kind of violence with which club-wielding policemen scattered a smaller group of demonstrators on Friday night ...

Dissident leaders repeated a call for a two-hour general strike on November 27. Vaclav Havel, the playwright and leading Czechoslovak dissident, reported that he had received a message from coal miners at a small pit in northern Bohemia, who expressed support for the requested stoppage. But the extent to which industrial workers might join the swelling protest remained both critical and, as yet, unanswered.

The next day, November 21, Tagliabue again reported from Prague. Events were beginning to happen more rapidly than could be understood:

Czechoslovakia's Communist leaders held their first talks with representatives of a newly formed opposition movement today, while more than 200,000 people joined in a fifth day of street demonstrations sustaining pressure for political change...
In a televised address tonight, Milos Jakes, the hard-line Communist Party General Secretary, appealed to citizens to "depart from this present, exacerbated situation." He warned, "There are boundaries that should not be overstepped."

Says who?

Later in the same article, Tagliabue writes:

Earlier, the playwright Vaclav Havel, a frequently arrested dissident leader stood on a balcony and told a huge gathering in Wenceslas Square of the meeting between Prime Minister Adamec and a delegation of the Civic Forum, a recently formed opposition group.
Mr. Adamec also promised that the Government would not impose martial law. His comments were reported by the official press agency.

The demonstrators had at times cried, "Punish, punish, punish!" - urging retribution for policemen who had used billy clubs to scatter protestors on Friday. As Mr. Havel spoke, some waved Czechoslovak flags and others applauded.

Next day, November 22, 1989, the sixth day of protests across Czechoslovakia, Tagliabue again reports from Prague. On this day, there were calls for the Communist leaders to step down. No compromise, no coalition - step down, step down.

Mr. [Alexander] Dubcek also spoke in public today for the first time since his efforts to introduce "Socialism with a human face" were crushed in 1968. In Bratislava, he addressed 2,000 people protesting the trial of a human-rights advocate, urging calm. Mr. Dubcek, who has been officially ignored while working in a state forestry office for much of the last two decades, was shown on state television tonight as he met protestors. Mr. Dubcek's message, read to the crowd in Prague, noted that he hoped to visit the capital soon and to appear in person in Wenceslas Square. When this was announced, the crowd began chanting, "Dubcek, Dubcek."...
At today's rally, Vaclav Havel, the playwright and dissident, told cheering crowds that he sought to reach "especially all the workers in our country who are for reform."

As cheers of "Long live the workers" echoed through the floodlit square, Mr. Havel continued, "Those who have been taking bloody vengeance against all their rivals for so many years are now afraid of us."

"But we are not like them," he said, from a balcony high above the square. "We don't want to take vengeance on anyone. We only ask to take control of our country."

On November 25, 1989, the Communist Party leadership in Czechoslovakia resigned. Astonishing. As Dientsbier said, once the rot has set in, Communism collapses very quickly. Many hard-liners were replaced by other Politburo members, not as well-known, and yet some of the leadership stayed in place, so it was not a true surrender, not yet. But it was a major concession. Alexander Dubcek, the long-exiled hero of the 1960s for his failed attempts to soften socialism and let in outside influence, returned to Prague on this day and made his first public appearance since 1968. The response to his appearance was overwhelming.

Steven Greenhouse reports in The New York Times on Nov. 25, 1989:

After the news of the resignations of the older leaders spread, there was singing and dancing and scenes of jubliation throughout the center of Prague, where just a week before the police had clubbed demonstrators in a vain effort to put down the protests.
"An old wise man said, 'If there once was light, why should there be darkness gain?'" Mr. Dubcek had told the crowd. "Let us act in such a way to bring the light back again."

Havel was no fool. He recognized that the resignation of the old leaders was just "same ol' same ol", a condescending smokescreen to try to fool the protestors into thinking it was a concession. There would be no change as long as the Communist Party was still in control. On November 25, that same day, he led protests against the "new" leadership.

R.W. Apple, Jr., reports on the opposition protests in The New York Times:

Opposition leaders redoubled their pressure on the tottering Communist regime in Czechoslovakia today, staging an immense protest rally and insisting that the shuffling of the Politburo on Friday night and further resignations this morning had failed to move the nation far enough toward democracy.
"The new leadership is a trick that was meant to confuse," said Vaclav Havel, the often-jailed playwright who to many symbolizes political dissent here. "The power remains in or is passing into the hands of the neo-Stalinists."

"Shame! Shame! Shame!" shouted thousands of his listeners, part of a huge throng of protesters estimated by Czechoslovak officials at 500,000 to 800,000 ... Today's crowd was the largest in the nine straight days of demonstrations ...

More than 24 hours after the old regime came apart, it was still not clear whether the Communists were ready for significant changes, including the abandonment of their claim to permanent control of the Government, or whether they were trying to regroup behind a new facade ...

A light snow was falling on Mr. Havel and Alexander Dubcek, the 67-year-old Slovak who instituted liberalization crushed by Soviet-led tanks 21 years ago, as they spoke to the vast throng at the stadium.

People in the crowd were in an exuberant if wary mood, their confidence buoyed by the departure of Mr. Jakes. They wore ribbons in red, blue and white, the national colors, and waved Czechoslovak flags as Mr. Havel told them that he was "profoundly disturbed" by the composition of the new Politburo named at 3 a.m. today.

One of the key successes of the velvet revolution was that the workers took up the cause. Czechoslovakia is a country with a long and storied past of intellectual heavyweights. Its literature, art, music, plays is one of its defining characteristics, similar to Ireland's dominance with the written word. But the velvet revolution, while begun (like so many of the revolutions that heady year) with the students and intellectuals, did not stop there. The worker joined the protests. In many cases (as usual) the industrial workers had more to lose. Retribution would be swift. Their salaries were minimal. They were in a fight just to survive everyday living. But they took up the call to strike, and joined the country-wide protests. Esther Fein, one of the many New York Times reporters stationed in Prague at the time, reported extensively on the workers participation in the protests, and wrote a piece on November 26 that I love - about how this was, in many respects, a "war on walls". She explains:

If you want to know what is going on in Prague, you have to read the walls, and the windows, and the sidewalks, and the railings, and the bumpers of city buses, all of which are covered with print.
Typed by students on home computers and typewriters, or in some cases hand painted, this "subway samizdat" has been the most effective means of spreading the word about the opposition movement and of informing the public about coming events like today's human chain, Saturday's mass at St. Vitus Cathedral and the weekend change of venue for a daily demonstration.

Even the subway workers have got involved. Today, announcers in the stations let people know the time and place of the rally where people were to hold hands and form chains of human solidarity. The announcers, who normally give the routings of trains, added the information that subway workers would be honoring the general strike from noon till 2 p.m. on Monday.

"It's a war on walls," said Jan Urban, one of the leaders of Civic Forum, the recently formed umbrella opposition group. "In a system where the state owns and controls the mass media, this is the only way to begin a campaign against the regime." ...

These new forms of expression, which just about two weeks ago would have been cause for arrest, have become so widespread and accepted that a worker who attended the Prague Communist Party meeting on Saturday said he overhead one member of the leadership asking another what time today's demonstration was scheduled for.

"I don't know," the official was heard to say. "Why don't you go outside and check the wall?"

Brill.

Fein brings up Vaclav Havel, as all the articles from Prague at that time did:

[Prague's] best known dissident, Vaclav H avel, is a playwright known for works of irony. Therefore it was not so strange that a longtime resident used the imagery of fiction to explain that for the last forty years, since Communists came to power here, people have become soured, feeling like a woman forced to marry the wrong man.
"It is like a young woman who is very much in love but she is made to marry another man," said the woman. "But she lives, she has children, and she carries on in a kind of muted way, as if it were a normal life, even though in her heart, she knows it isn't normal. Then one day she sees her youthful lover on a bridge and suddenly, she comes alive.

"We are like that woman, and our lover may still be on the other side of the bridge, but at least now he is visible."

On November 27, 1989, the two-hour general strike happened. Shops closed, cafes, factories, schools, everything closed. It had not been clear, until it went down, whether or not the workers would support the students. But everywhere in the nation, people walked off their jobs.

On November 28, Serge Schmemann reported in the New York Times that it was "Czechoslovakia's moment in time":

So dizzyingly swift was the downfall of Milos Jakes and his associates in the Communist leadership that when Prime Minister Ladislav Ademec met today with Vaclav Havel and the other opposition leaders of the Civic Forum, the participants seemed to be sweeping away some unpleasant remnants before plunging into the next and far more complex phase in the shaping of a post-Communist Czechoslovakia ...
But the vast force of humanity so strikingly mobilized over a week and a half of demonstrations and yesterday's two-hour general strike - a power manifest in the red, white and blue ribbons worn by every second Czechoslovak, in the flags decorating every house, in the myriad notices plastered to the shop windows of Prague and in the jubilant air pervading the old capital - seemed to preclude any chance of a comeback by the old guard.

21 years earlier, it required Soviet tanks to stifle the Prague Spring reform period. Now the Kremlin seemed almost irrelevant, Russians totally absent from the demonstrations or the slogans except for the rare tribute to Mikhail S. Gorbachev. And without Moscow, the old guard had proven to be only a flimsy facade ...

The glow was almost tangible in the streets. People seemed unusually polite, even affectionate toward one another. At an impromptu public discussion in the small Ypsilon studio theater, an actor drew laughs when he said he saw a tram grind to a halt and come back in reverse to pick up a tardy passenger ...

Schmemann goes on to write:

How Czechoslovakia would fare in a post-Communist order was, at this stage, impossible to predict. But in comparison with Poland, Hungary and East Germany, at least, it seemed reasonably well positioned.
Czechoslovakia could not boast of East Germany's special links to a prosperous Western patron. But that also safeguarded it from the rush for West German marks and goods that has seized the East Germans since the border between the two Germanys fell open.

A well-developed industrial base, even one allowed to grow decrepit under forty years of Communist mismanagement, still afforded the Czechoslovaks a disciplined labor force and a base to build on.

With the population at a manageable 15 million and a foreign debt nowhere near the level of Hungary's or Poland's, Czechoslovakia seemed free of imminent economic crisis.

And a rich cultural tradition, coupled with a lingering faith in socialism, seemed to preclude any major social problems - at least in the immediate future.

The very swiftness of its revolution seemed to be in Czechoslovakia's favor. Though the bloodshed during the police attacks on November 17 still hung heavy in the public memory, the subsequent pace of events gave these days an improvisational character that seemed to sustain idealism and a party-like atmosphere.

There was not the fatigue of Poland's long series of strikes, nor the demoralizing exodus of East Germany. Rather, there was an energy to burn and the glow on the horizon was still bright.

By one of those lovely quirks so prevalent in these heady days, Civic Forum was given the Magic Lantern experimental theater for its temporary headquarters. For their evening news conferences, leaders of the opposition sat before a newly built set representing the last tunnel of the Minotaur - a maze guarded by a mythical creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man - with the light at the end of it glowing behind.

They had not planned it that way, nor had the theater, nor had Czechoslovakia. But in the spirit of the moment, improvisation and destiny seemed to blend in wondrous ways.

On that same day November 28, Serge Schmemann wrote a piece in The NY Times about Vaclav Havel, the character of the man who was very quickly rising to the top of the opposition.

If proof is needed that the pen is mightier than the sword, then Vaclav Havel is a veritable smoking gun. In and out of prisons over the last twenty years, his plays banned in his native land, the playwright today accepted the figurative surrender of his tormentors at a meeting with Prime Minister Ladislav Ademec ...
Active in 1968 as chairman of an unsanctioned Club of Independent Writers, he subsequently helped found the Charter 77 dissident movement and through his clashes with the authorities was repeatedly sent to prison.

Mr. Havel was on one of his stints in prison only last May, this time for trying to lay a wreath at the grave of Jan Palach, a student who burned himself to death when the Warsaw Pact forces invaded in 1968. As recently as a month ago, the police dragged Mr. Havel from his sickbed to put him in detention on the eve of anticipated demonstrations marking the October 28 National Day.

Now, at the huge demonstrations that have abruptly routed Czechoslovakia's neo-Stalinist regime, the crowds have chanted "Havel! Havel!" as the writer has proclaimed the demise of the system he fought with pen in hand and his willingness to join a government that would guide Czechoslovakia to democracy.

"If someone spends his life writing the truth without caring for the consequences, he inevitably becomes a political authority in a totalitarian regime" Mr. Havel said in the magazine interview [with Speigel]. "I am willing, and may be able, to assume a role for a short time. This transitional phase may need symbolic representatives, who are not politicians but who represent the hopes of society."

What was good for democracy, however, was not conducive to his art. "I confess I'd like to arrange with the Interior Ministry to be free three days a week and to go to prison for two days a week to take a break from freedom," he said in the interview.

Always the artist.

By December, things were really falling apart in fascinating ways. Realizing that they were losing power, and perhaps still trying to maintain some moral authority, Communist leaders all over Eastern Europe, were basically competing with one another to make public statements of how bad they had been. It was an orgy of self-deprecating behavior. "We were the worst." "No, WE were the worst." What is fascinating about this is, after 70 years of being in control without giving the population a say in events ... suddenly they all seemed to care, and desperately, about what their own populations thought of them. "Maybe they'll like us more if we condemn the Warsaw Pact??" Fascinating. Feeble. Desperate. On December 1, the new Politburo in Czechoslavakis made a public declaration, condemning the invasion of Czechoslovakia back in 1968. Who could have ever predicted such a turn of events? The Soviet-led invasion of the country was what re-instated the Communists' moral authority. To then backtrack and say, "That was really bad of us" is, of course, a nice gesture, but these were cynical times. You are trying to hold on to power, and you condemn the very thing that reinforced your power? What country friends is this? After Czecholavakia's statement of condemnation, the other Warsaw Pact members (Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria, East Germany and Hungary) raced to outdo it. They signed a statement, jointly, saying "What we did back then was so wrong and we are so sorry."

The response of the populace to this statement, which would have been earth-shattering only a couple weeks earlier, was one big yawn. If the Politburo hoped that such an admission would somehow pacify the protesters they were sorely mistaken. If anything, it just increased the intensity. "Thanks for the apology, guys, now you REALLY have to step down."

And on December 7, 1989, Ladislav Adamec, Prime Minster of Communist Czechoslavakia resigned. He was replaced by his deputy. The pressure from the Civic Forum increased for the whole kit-and-kaboodle to resign - letting them (Vaclav Havel, et al) decide what should be done from there. On that same day, Vaclav Havel made a public statement that he would accept the role of President, if it was offered to him.

Henry Kamm reports from Prague on that day in The NY Times:

In less than a month, the modest 53-year-old writer has gone from being a bookish and persecuted symbol of resistance to totalitarianism to become the acclaimed leader of the Civic Forum mass movement, which is shaking the foundations of a 41-year-old Communist regime...
And tonight, after fencing wittily with several reporters and refusing to deny his availability, he finally owned up to it.

"I have repeatedly said my occupation is writer," he replied to an American correspondent. "I have no political ambitions. I don't feel myself to be a professional politician. But I have always placed the public interest above my own.

"And if, God help us, the situation develops in such a way that the only service that I could render my country would be to do this, then of course I would do it."

And so it came to be. The pressure to stand down got to be too much for the crumbling Communist regime, and so - on December 29, 1989, Vaclav Havel was chosen to be the president of the new democratic Czechoslovakia.

Craig R. Whitney, reporter for The New York Times, reports from Prague, on that day:

Vaclav Havel, the Czechoslovak writer whose insistence on speaking the truth about repression in his country repeatedly cost him his freedom over the last 21 years, was elected President by Parliament today in an event celebrated by the throng outside the chamber as the redemption of their freedom ...
Completing the formality, all 323 deputies in the heavily Communist legislature voted for Mr. Havel, Czechoslovakia's first non-Communist President since 1948.

Mr. Dubcek and Mr. Calfa left the sixteenth-century hall to fetch the new President, somber in a dark blue suit, and swear him in with an oath revised by Parliament on Thursday to delete a promise of loyalty to the cause of socialism.

After a 20-gun salute and a military parade, he addressed the joyous crowd that thronged the castle courtyard.

"Dear friends," he said, "I promise you I will not betray your confidence. I will lead this country to free elections. This must be done in an honest and calm way, so that the clean face of our revolution is not soiled. That is the task for all of us. Thank you."

After his short speech, Mr. Havel went into St. Vitus Cathedral, within the castle walls, for a Te Deum mass presided over by 90-year-old Frantisek Cardinal Tomasek, the country's Roman Catholic Primate and Archbishop of Prague. The Gothic cathedral was jammed witih people of every age. The Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and chor performed Dvorak's Te Deum.

Whitney writes:

[Havel] is a man who wrote, in a 1984 acceptance speech for a French university award that the Czechoslovak authorities would not allow him to pick up, "The slogan 'better Red than dead' does not irritate me as an expression of surrender to the Soviet Union, but it terrifies me as an expression of the renunciation by Western people of any claim to a meaningful life and of their acceptance of impersonal power as such. For what the slogan really says is that nothing is worth giving one's life for."
Through much of Mr. Havel's work runs the thread of what he calls "the absolute horizon" - the moral and philosophical judgments that give human life its meaning. He repeatedly warned his persecutors that by their repression of human freedom they were ultimately undercutting their own existence as well.

And that, my friends, is one of the reasons why Vaclav Havel is one of my personal heroes. He never abdicates personal responsibility, even when it requires a long hard look at oneself in the mirror. The prison guard is AS corrupted and trapped as the prisoner. And what is it in us that accepts the ties that bind, that embraces oppression? The corruption is not just in the leadership. Corruption like that seeps down into the populace as well, and that was what Havel fought against. Through his plays, certainly, but also through his human rights activism and political activity. I'll get to that in a minute.

In 1975, Vaclav Havel had written a letter to Gustav Husak, then the President of Czechoslavakia. He warned Husak of what could happen when a population is kept down for too long. It wasn't about politics for Havel - it was about "human dignity", and how such dignity (such natural God-given gifts - a la "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness") cannot be bestowed by anyone in power. We already HAVE them. We are born with them. If you deprive people of these things, you, according to Havel in his letter to Husak, create "permanent humiliation of their human dignity." In this daring letter (for which he was imprisoned), Havel wrote:

I fer the price we are all bound to pay for the drastic suppression of history, the cruel and needless banishment of life into the underground of society and the depths of the human soul, the new compulsory 'deferral' of every opportunity for society to live in anything like a natural way ... No wonder, then, that when the crust cracks and the lava of life rolls out, there appear not only well-considered attempts to rectify old wrongs, not only searchings for truth and for reforms matching life's needs, but also symptoms of bilious hatred, vengeful wrath and a kind of feverish desire for immediate compensation for all the endured degradation.

Havel's genius was his insistence on being "calm", and for not demanding "immediate compensation", even though he had been imprisoned repeatedly. What a temperament. How many revolutions go off the rails when they insist on lining up the old guard against the wall and blowing their brains out? It may be satisfactory in a momentary blood-lust kind of way, but that impulse in humanity (while understandable) should not be lauded or praised - unless you feel like Madame Defarge in Tale of Two Cities is a valid role model for your nation. Good luck to you if that is the case. Good luck with ignoring historical precedent. And also good luck to you when the tide inevitably turns, as it always does, and you find yourself facing the firing squad.

Havel's hat-trick was psychological, in many respects. He had years and years of practice. He lived under censorship and oppression. He retaliated by writing the plays he wanted to write, absurdist ironic masterpieces, which side-stepped literalism and yet left no doubt as to what he was criticizing. He's an artist. He's not a politician. He's a writer. His survival instinct was from a belief in inherent human dignity and also the great make-believe mindset of "as if". Live in truth. Nobody can tell you how to live. Nobody can say to you that you MUST ignore your basic human dignity, even if the entire political structure appears to be set up that way. Take a leap of faith. Like all actors and artists and writers do on a daily basis - it is their craft. Live AS IF you were free. Truth is not bestowed. It exists in you. Those who sneer at artists often miss the fact that they have a lot to teach regular civilians, about how to live life, and how to survive. Havel is certainly a great example of that.

On January 1, 1990, Havel officially assumed the role of President. He made an acceptance speech on that day that I consider to be one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century (and it is usually included in any such anthology).

Havel's speech, broadcast on the radio, set the tone for all that was to follow. It is referred to as "the contaminated moral environment" speech. After decades of double-speak, decades of being lied to by their own government, decades of muffling their true sentiments, Vaclav Havel stood up and told the truth. He had been preparing for this moment since the 1960s.

We, as human beings, can recognize truth when we hear it.

Czeslaw Milosz, another famous dissident, brilliant poet, said in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize: "In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot." This is the atmosphere into which Vaclav Havel spoke, on that momentous day in 1990.

We know when we're being lied to, deceived. Truth is unmistakable, and Havel knew that. However, and this is key, Havel did not let the Czech people off the hook which is another reason why the "velvet revolution" was so amazing. It was not about pointing fingers, screaming, "YOU DID THIS TO US". Havel encouraged the Czech people to take responsibility for their destinies, to take responsibility for having endured the tyranny for so long, for having internalized oppression, and through that internalization - participated in it. Willingly. The "contaminated moral environment" was, to Havel, not only about the Communist regime. He addressed that comment to every Czech person who had tolerated living under tyranny. No passing the buck, no blame. Take responsibility.

Vaclav Havel's Speech, Jan. 1, 1990:
Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nation is not being used sensibly ... We have polluted our soil, our rivers and forests, bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and we have today the most contaminated environment in Europe. Adult people in our country die earlier than in most other European countries.

But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous ...

The previous regime -- armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology -- reduced man to a force of production and nature to a tool of production ... It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine, whose real meaning is not clear to anyone ...

When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere ... I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all -- though naturally to differing extremes -- responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim: we are all also its co-creators ...

We have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us only, to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue but also because it could blunt the duty that each of us faces today, namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly ... Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all.

If we realize this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts ...

In the effort to rectify matters ... we have something to lean on. The recent period -- and in particular, the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution -- has shown the enormous human, moral, and spiritual potential and civil culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is not wise to trust only the face it presents to you. I am happy that I was not mistaken. Everywhere in the world people wonder where those meek, humiliated, skeptical, and seemingly cynical citizens of Czechoslovakia found the marvelous strength to shake from their shoulders in several weeks and in a decent and peaceful way the totalitarian yoke...

There are free elections and an election campaign ahead of us. Let us not allow this struggle to dirty the so far clean face of our gentle revoltuion ... It is not really important now which party, club, or group will prevail in the elections. The important thing is that the winners will be the best of us, in the moral, civil, political and professional sense, regardless of their political affiliations ...

In conclusion, I would like to say that I want to be a president who will speak less and work more. To be a president who will ... always be present among his fellow citizens and listen to them well.

You may ask what kind of republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just, in short, of a humane republic which serves the individual and which therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn. Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such it is impossible to solve any of our problems, human, economic, ecological, social, or political.

People, your government has returned to you!

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Fosse time

All That Jazz turns 30 years old this month, and Matt Zoller Seitz has a wonderful appreciation/analysis of the movie, and its influence (with great quotes from other directors and editors about how that movie impacted their art) in The New York Times.

Fosse was so pleased with the result that he and his screenwriter partner, Robert Alan Aurthur, built time shifts into the early screenplay for “All That Jazz,” essentially treating the script into an uncommonly detailed shot list. Mr. Heim said the film’s high-speed rifling through Gideon’s recent past, childhood and deathbed fantasies (in which he’s interrogated by Jessica Lange’s bombshell angel of death on a set that looks like the Kit Kat Klub from “Cabaret” as redecorated by Fellini) was so flexible, and so distinctively Fosse’s, that the director’s regular composer, Ralph Burns, hung a label on it.
“Ralph said there are flashbacks and flash-forwards, and then there is Fosse time,” Mr. Heim said. “When we were working on Bob’s films, we were working in Fosse time. The phrase has to do with not really being locked into any particular time frame but taking full advantage of what you can do with film, which is mess around with time. That’s one of my favorite things to do, and you don’t get too many chances to do it in straight narrative movies. I got to do it on Bob’s last movie, ‘Star 80,’ also. It was all very exciting for me as an editor.”

Go read the whole thing.

I love the bit about Sofia Coppola and Sarah Flack, working on Marie Antoinette.

All That Jazz is one of my favorite movies.

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December 22, 2009

"As I was going over the Cork and Kerry mountains ..."

Metallica playing their rocking version of "Whiskey in the Jar" in Dublin, Ireland. Listen to the throngs of people singing along at the top of their voices. I love it because they don't just know it because Metallica "covered" it, as a lot of other people know it. They know it because, duh, they're Irish. They're SCREAMING these lyrics. It's a high quality video. Thrilling.

I love the official music video of this as well (thanks, Beth, for the reminder). It shows what is, perhaps, the most insane party in the history of parties. Must have been a hell of a lot of fun to film.

But here is Metallica in Ireland. Wish I had been there.

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"It's easy to forget, as Billboard's Country charts fill with faintly twangy pop and lazy paeans to dogs and trucks, that this music has an atavistic darkness."

One of the best reviews of Crazy Heart I've read so far. I loved the observation about the relationship between Colin Farrell's "Tommy Sweet" and Jeff Bridges' "Bad Blake" - something I felt was very strong in the picture, especially the duet scene mentioned.

The part is a vindication of Bridges's unaffected talent and is his best in years. He's as good a reactor as actor, so patient and sedentary that his performance's quiet ache sneaks up on you when he's doing nothing more dramatic than settling onto a barstool. Bad recites his age as a refrain—"I'm 57 years old"—and it seems Bridges has lived them all. It's in the habitual gestures, the way he negotiates with a mic stand and passes a drink from his chest to the bedside table with a coil of the wrist—for Bad is usually sprawled and splayed.

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December 21, 2009

Jeff Bridges: My manifesto

To say "at last" or "finally" in regards to his tour de force performance as washed-up country/western star Bad Blake in Crazy Heart would be to completely disregard how uniformly superb he has been from the very start of his career. There is no "at last" here, at least not to those of us who have been paying attention. He has been turning in detailed, powerful, diverse performances for DECADES. The fact that he is so amazing in Crazy Heart is not a surprise. He is ALWAYS amazing. See my thoughts on this phenomenal actor, the best American actor working today (and on ANY day) here. Hyperbole is too good for this man. To quote Bruce Reid, a commenter at HSD:

You're right about the inability to avoid hyperbole when it comes to Bridges; given his uniform excellence I thought it'd be easier to pick five bad performances and think about why they didn't work. Till I scanned his filmography and found, maybe, three.

Indeed. Like Meryl Streep, he has been consistently astonishing for his entire career. He also has rarely repeated himself. And it's not about tricks, with him. He's not trying to prove anything to anyone. He doesn't need to prove he's a great actor by putting on a limp, or a British accent. If the character limps, he limps so well that you can almost see the X-rays of the disjointed hip bones, it's that convincing. If he has to have an accent, or a mannerism to go with the character, it becomes so endemic to the performance that it is unthinkable without it. His range is breathtaking. I do not sense much of an ego, with Jeff Bridges, and that's probably why he's shamefully flown under the radar for so long (while his reviews are always excellent, he's more often than not ignored by the Academy). No nomination for Door in the Floor? Sorry, but that's ridiculous. It was the best performance that year. Some of his best work as well, which means it's better than anyone else's good work, because he's Jeff Bridges. I have a lot of thoughts about Bridges (again, go read my piece about him to see some of them), and also a lot of thoughts about ego and actors, but I'll save that for another post I'm working on. I'll touch on it briefly here.

The lack of ego in Jeff Bridges is, in part, why I think he is such an incredible chameleon. But I don't want to overstate this, because it's not 100% true that actors who are NOT chameleons are somehow lesser actors. Katharine Hepburn wasn't a chameleon. Angelina Jolie isn't a chameleon. John Wayne wasn't a chameleon. Also, having an EGO is not a bad thing for an actor (but again, I'll save that for the other post - argh, it keeps creeping in). Ego helps actors do extraordinary things at times, if utilized correctly. It makes movie stars. But Jeff Bridges is that rare thing: a chameleon AND a movie star. A movie star AND a man with no obvious ego. If you put some of his performances up side by side (and I'm just cherry-picking here, you could just go through his career and do this yourself) - it is hard to find the similarities between ANY of them, except for the fact that the same man played them all. The Dude in The Big Lebowski and Starman. Played by the same guy? The racist sweet lonely Turner Kendall in The Morning After and the befuddled macho vaguely dumb Vernon Hightower in the awesomely funny Nadine? Same guy? Jack Kelson in American Heart and Preston Tucker in Tucker? Obadaiah Stane in Iron Man and Jack Lucas in The Fisher King? Throw in there Richard Bone in Cutter's Way, the leather-pants-clad Lightfoot in the deeply bizarre and (as Mitchell has said) "offensive on so many levels" Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, his sea captain in White Squall, his creep-tastic serial killer in The Vanishing ... on and on and on and on. Mix and match as you like, the results will be the same. He is off the charts versatile. But even "versatile" doesn't quite cover it, because that seems to connote a "skill" (he can cry, he can laugh, he can play the guitar, he's versatile!) but it goes deeper than that.

I keep quoting myself in that other piece, and it's so obnoxious, but I can't help it. Shirley Maclaine spoke of working with Meryl Streep in Postcards from the Edge and her observation was that Streep "completely abdicates her own personality for that of the character's". This goes beyond SKILL as an actor. This is channeling. It is truly magic. Meryl Streep came and spoke at my school and she was quite inarticulate about acting, the greatest evidence (besides her work) that she is a genius. She got skittish about talking about the actual "hows" of it. Maybe talking about it would make it go away. Jeff Bridges obviously is a man out in the world who is things other than an actor. He is a husband, a father, a brother, an uncle ... he's a real guy with a real life, and he obviously has friends and family members who can say, "Oh, I know Jeff. Jeff is the type of guy who ...." But for us, out here in the movie darkness, we do not know who that is. He doesn't let us see that. He's in acting for another reason altogether. Maybe it's a personal catharsis for him, to inhabit other people. Maybe it's a way to satiate some curiosity, or some enduring questions about "what would it be like to ..." I suppose he is revealed, as good acting always reveals something - but the channeling mechanism, the strength of the character he is playing - is always the filter through which we SEE him. If you only saw him as The Dude, you'd probably think he was always like that, it seemed so natural, so real. But then if you only saw The Door in the Floor, or Bad Company, or The Fisher King - if those were your only "meetings" with Bridges, then you'd think he was like THAT. It's when you put them all together that you can see how truly extraordinary this man's talent is.

We all have many sides, many selves. Bridges knows how to "conduct" himself, as in - pointing to the oboe when he needs it, gesturing to the string section when that is what is called for - and he knows how to let all else subside. The humor that was in The Dude is totally submerged when he plays Bad Blake in Crazy Heart. Or Jack Baker in The Fabulous Baker Boys, one of the sour-est crankiest leading men in film history (second only to Cary Grant's Geoff Carter in Only Angels Have Wings). And so, with this give and take with his own innate qualities, Bridges is a maestro of his own talent. So many actors - very fine actors - can't even come close to doing that. He's on another level. I love how mysterious it is, and also how uninterested he appears to be in it. He does what he does. But again, he has nothing to prove.

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I think one of the greatest performances ever given by an American actor is by Jeff Bridges in American Heart, and while it was a critical success, it obviously wasn't a commercial success. But there he was, giving his best work, blowing away every other actor on the playing field, in this tiny movie that played in art-houses, mainly. That's what I mean by lack of ego. However, the man does not lack ambition. He has been working by stealth. This again touches on my thoughts about ego, which I want to save, but here's a taste of it.

He has not "campaigned" for Oscars, not openly, he doesn't appear in movies where it's a done deal that he will be nominated. And when he does work that is so spectacular, like he does in The Door in the Floor, and it's not even nominated - he doesn't seem to crawl back to the trenches and start to scheme and plot that "next year will be the year". You can sense that kind of ambition in certain actors, and I don't fault them for it. Who doesn't want to be in good projects and try to get some respect from your peers? But when you can sense an "Oscar grab" in a performance, it's a turnoff for me. Bridges is always better than anyone else - like I said, hyperbole is too gentle for his talent - but he seems to do his thing, awesomely, every time, and then go back to Malibu, to have a Scotch on his deck, and hang out with his wife, and play guitar, and then, the next project comes along - whatever it is - and he goes back to work. There's not a visible campaign ANYWHERE. It is so rare as to be almost unthinkable. I am trying to think of an equivalent and am coming up empty. At least in terms of true movie stars of his particular wattage. He is not an indie favorite, he is not a best-kept secret, nothing like that. He is a giant motherfucking movie star. I can think of many actors on other tiers of the industry who are also consistently fantastic - Samantha Morton immediately comes to mind - but while she is certainly wildly successful, you can't really call her a "movie star". She's an actress, a successful and in-demand film actress, who, I think, puts many other movie stars to shame. She is amazing. But Jeff Bridges is a movie star with a capital M and a capital S. To be at his level, at his age, after the length of his career, and to not sense a "campaign" there ("I gotta have a comeback now", "THIS role I'll get my Oscar") is truly amazing. Unheard of. It takes an enormous lack of ego to be at his level and to not plan.

I don't want to simplify this, because he obviously picks his roles very very carefully. As Bruce Reid mentioned above, there are very few missteps in his career - and I don't believe that's an accident or coincidence. He PICKS. He CHOOSES. He is extremely smart. But his concerns in the choosing appear to be with the project itself, not what it can do for him, or how it can position himself. He appears (again, I have no idea) to be beyond those careerist concerns.

Maybe he's a bigger genius than I ever realized, than any of us realized, and this whole THING has been a plan. Maybe after Last Picture Show, when he was a pudgy-faced teenager, he thought to himself, "Let me just be good ... in every single thing I do ... and maybe when I'm in my late 50s ... it will suddenly be my time." It's strange to say that for me because I think that it's basically ALWAYS Jeff Bridges' time. He's my favorite living actor. I do not consider an Oscar statue to be the measure of an actor's worth. Cary Grant didn't win an Oscar. At least not for a particular role he played. Marisa Tomei has an Oscar for a role she could have played in her sleep. So that goes to show you how much MEANING it really has. Of course it has meaning, in terms of career, and opportunity, and being "in the history books forever", but besides that: who gives a shit? Those actors who appear NOT to give a shit are the ones who often are the last men standing. Jeff Bridges will be the last man standing. In many ways, he IS the last man standing. He is of the same generation as DeNiro, Pacino who dominated in the 70s and 80s, while Bridges? Not so much. Although, please, if I could NOT dominate in the 70s and 80s and have the level of success Bridges had? I would die a happy woman. But look at what has happened. The best work of DeNiro and Pacino is long in the past (so far. I live in hope). I will get into that in my ego/actor post. Bridges gives the sense, he always gives the sense, that his best work very well may be ahead of him.

He's a star. Yes. But before that, he is an actor. He approaches his career the way my friends do who are actors on a regional-theatre level, awesome actors all of them, none of them famous on a wide scale, although very well-known in their own communities. They get cast as Puck, or Nora in A Doll's House, or the Red Queen, or Eliza Doolittle - and they work their asses off, in a very specific and focused way, to do that particular play in that particular time. If the play calls for singing, they work like hell on the songs. If the play calls for an accent, they get a coach and work on the accent. These are the actors, true passionate and committed, that make up the industry. To find that same level of workmanship and selflessness in a movie star is amazing. People who are giant stars tend to get cautious. It makes sense. They have way more to lose than when they were young and hungry and eager to make their name. That much attention can make people clamp down, and try to just hold on to what they already have. Jeff Bridges, who never reached a kind of critical mass, never had an "iconic" part, that tapped into the zeitgeist, or was culturally explosive, avoided those issues. So he is hugely successful, yet he STILL doesn't have that much to lose. You can feel it in his work. He is not protective. He is not clamped-down. He is fearless. Even more so now. What happened to other actors is in reverse with him. The more successful and visible he has become, the more risks he has taken.

Bad Blake in Crazy Heart, as far as I'm concerned, is just in the continuum of his excellence. It is certainly one of his most memorable parts. Jeff Bridges is, it need not be said really, a stunningly handsome man. He is a born leading man. So to see him here, overweight, perpetually sweaty, with a strange gait that suggests serious health problems NOT being handled, is thrilling. There's one point when he leans in to kiss Maggie Gylennhall, and although she is drawn to him emotionally, she instinctively backs up, because, you know, of his breath. Cigarettes and booze. The man REEKS. Jeff Bridges creates this. I can smell his breath through the screen. He is sexy, but that's just because he still has the faded glow around him of success. Bad Blake was once a big country/western star. He drives around the Southwest in a beat-up truck, being holed up in ratty motels, playing one-night-only gigs at bowling alleys and ratty piano bars. It is a fall from grace. But America, this land of "no second acts", remembers its heroes, and Bad Blake is remembered. He will not be allowed a second act, but his first act will be extended, ad nauseum, until the man passes out anonymously in some alley in Durango. Bad Blake stands up on the tiny stages, hemmed in by his rent-a-bands, singing songs that are 30 years old, but you can see, by the beaming faces of the lovely people in attendance, that they remember. Hm, sound familiar? But Bad Blake is so far gone in his alcoholism that the love of the people that remains cannot touch him.

Bridges has an innate strain of cruelty in him that is in all of his parts (except, notably, Starman, where I imagine he, in his talent, "conducted" that strong strain in him to be silent), and if I could say that there was something he always does, in all parts, it would be that cruel streak. He expects a lot from people. He punishes them, emotionally, when they let him down. Think of Max in Fearless and how coldly he treats his wife because she didn't have the great gift of being in the plane crash with him. This is not affectation. This is true. This is vintage Bridges. Sorry, I know it's bad form to continually reference MYSELF, but I cover that in detail in the piece on HSD. Jeff Bridges never plays joiners. He plays solitary men. Sometimes the solitary nature of their character means they are visionaries: Seabiscuit, Tucker - and, to some degree, The Door in the Floor, although that has more of a tormented subtext to it. But more often than not, the solitary quality of his characters, leaves them in isolation - even when they find themselves in a romance. The Fisher King, The Fabulous Baker Boys. It's rare to find Jeff Bridges in a community-driven character. He's not a political organizer (funny, to think of his portrayal of The President in The Contender - think about how isolated that guy is, basically spending his time as President calling down bizarre food requests to the White House kitchen to see how they come up with it - he doesn't play the President as a passionate involved politician. He plays him as a weirdo loner.) He often plays weirdo loners. To be so convincing as a weirdo loner, and to look like he does, is again, almost historical in its rarity. Many people with the kind of beauty Bridges has often want to play against their beauty, in order to prove their acting chops. I get it. I do. Even though I'm not beautiful like that, I can understand the impulse. But Bridges, a magician of acting, a true channeler, is beyond all of that. He couldn't care less about any of that.

His performance in Crazy Heart is one of the most palpable portrayals I can think of what addiction is. I thought of Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas as I watched Bridges handle the need, the NEED, for a drink, and I also thought of Gena Rowlands in Opening Night, and how, at all moments when she is not drinking, she vibrates with need for a fix. It is never discussed or lingered over, but it is the OTHER character in that film. Unnamed, yet present. Bridges has moments that are breathtakingly sad, where you can feel his body kick in ... He may be having a lovely day, taking his new girlfriend and her son for a hot-air balloon ride, a beautiful day, right? But he can't be present. He can't. Because all he is present to is how much he can't wait to be alone and pour a drink. It's terrible. It makes you sick to watch. It takes great compassion and empathy to portray such a need. He does it without condescension or self-importance. It is a physical sensation, outside of any actor-ish needs, such as "Look at me having DTs." I myself felt sick watching Bridges maneuver through his life in Crazy Heart. In the middle of scenes, I would think, "Jesus, he's about due for a drink now, isn't he?" The addiction is so palpable, so present, that I couldn't forget about it, not for a second. Late in Crazy Heart, the alcoholism takes center stage, but the film isn't about that, not really. It's not a "clean up and watch how wonderful life is" kind of story. Bad Blake is too far gone for that. As he says to another character at one point, "I been drunk most of my life." There's a lot of wreckage. It can't be fixed. His life cannot be repaired.

Compared to last year's The Wrestler, Crazy Heart is not as bleak. There is more hope for humanity, and for the lost souls among us, in Crazy Heart. The Wrestler is ruthless, in typical Darron Aronofsky style. If there is hope anywhere, it will be crushed by Aronofsky! In some ways, my sensibility is more like Aronofsky's. I don't like easy endings. I don't relate at all to NEATness, which is why I love John Cassavetes' movies so much (speaking of Opening Night). I find neatness alienating, and I find a desire for neatness in plot and story to be even more alienating. So I relate to the bleakness of The Wreslter, because that seems pretty true to life to me. You don't always get what you want, and that's final. Crazy Heart's path is not the path of The Wrestler, and I haven't decided yet if the movie is stronger or weaker for that. I'm still pondering it. I can't tell what is MY need ("I wish the movie went like THIS") and what might be an actual flaw in the film.

Regardless. There is a giant bear of a performance going on by Bridges in Crazy Heart, and he is as good as he has ever been.

With him, that's saying a hell of a lot, but it's also just stating the obvious. As far as I'm concerned, Jeff Bridges has ALWAYS been as good as he's ever been. Which is the best.

My House Next Door piece on Bridges here.

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Yi Yi; dir. Edward Yang

Edward Yang's masterpiece Yi Yi works on you slowly. At nearly three hours, it takes its time, lingering on scenes after a more conventional director would have cut. Yang waits to see what happens after the catharsis. Yi Yi reminds me of the epic movies from the 1970s in America - Reds (with its intuitive and non-literal piecing-together of events, via small scenes that feel "caught" as opposed to planned for and acted-out), The Deer Hunter (with the giant meandering opening wedding sequence which is the epitome of taking its time, it's the first THIRD of the movie, that scene) - films where the directors did not feel obliged to race to story story story (as in plot), realizing that it is through the characters, and their behavior when they are NOT just acting out the obligations of the plot, that the real story will be revealed. Yi Yi never drags, however, and that is a testament to Yang's skill as a director, not to mention the work of Wei-han Wang, the cinematographer (a more consistently beautiful-looking movie I have rarely seen) and the superb editing job of Bo-Wen Chan. Yi Yi tells the story of a family in Taipei, and the peripheral people who come in and out of their lives, neighbors, business associates, boyfriends. It is a highly observant film, gripping in its detailed and complex psychological portraits of an entire family, and how they operate, as a group and as individuals.

There is the patriarch, N.J., played by Nien-Jen Wu (a real pioneer in Taiwan cinema, a fascinating man). He works as an executive for a software company, surrounded by business associates who are more openly accepting of the drudgery and silliness of some of the job requirements. N.J. has a family, a wife and two children, but he spends most of his time, even when in the presence of his family, with his headphones on, listening to classical music. It starts as a small character bit, something you notice about someone else, in passing ("Oh, he listens to music all the time...") but gradually, it becomes one of the most important things to know about this man. His desire to escape. Yet his desire (at least at first) is not for a big gesture, running off to join the circus, for example, or having extra-marital dalliances with young drunk hotties ... His desire is muted. He does what he can. He is obviously a loyal man, although he doesn't have a great love for his wife, yet there is something missing for him. He finds it in music. He can get lost there. He is a good and involved father, but there is a crack in his psyche. Missed opportunities, lost hopes and dreams.

In the first scene of the movie, a wedding (which is hilariously and lingeringly filmed - the bride is hugely pregnant, and everyone is scandalized but trying to be okay with it), he runs into a woman in the elevator of the swanky hotel where the wedding takes place. Their encounter is charged. They obviously knew one another long ago. It is a brief encounter, and you might miss it, but it starts to open up the cracks. It is the catalyst. She was a woman he had once loved and lost. The only woman he has ever loved. We don't realize this until much later in the film, however, but none of Yi Yi would take place without that fateful run-in in the elevator. It is a small moment in a long day, with lots of different elements - the scandal of the wedding, the fact that an ex-girlfriend of the groom shows up at the reception and makes a scene, having to be escorted out of the joint, NJ's elderly mother, sitting off to the side, starting to feel ill so that she has to be taken home ... the tapestry of a family. Into this mix, comes the love from the past, played by Su-Yun Ko, and with just a couple of words, "N.J.! Fancy meeting you here!", etc., N.J. starts to unravel.

Min-Min is NJ's wife, played beautifully by Elaine Jin, a superb actress. She has an office job, and there are a couple of scenes where you can see, in her interactions with some of her coworkers, that she, too, is dissatisfied with life. Only it is hard for her to pinpoint what, exactly, is wrong. A coworker has been spending time with a spiritual guru, going on weekend retreats, and Min-Min is curious about it, but doesn't take action. There is a sense in Yi Yi that life can be an eternal treadmill, you step onto one specific path, and then, with little choice on your part, you are carried on to logical ends. You have very little say in the matter. Why can't Min Min, on her own, start to pursue spiritual truth if that is what she is feeling called to? Well, we all know that feeling of WANTING something, and wondering: but, how will I make it work? Could I just go away for a weekend and leave my family? What exactly is my problem anyway, and why am I dissatisfied when I am so lucky and blessed? Who am I to want something more? It's a head trip. The catalyst for Min Min also occurs on the day of the wedding when her mother-in-law, who has been feeling ill, suddenly slips into a coma after being dropped off after the reception. She comes to live with NJ and Min Min for her recovery, but she is comatose. The doctors tell NJ and Min Min that she is aware of their presence, that they should talk to her, to keep her mind active. So the family starts to take turns, talking to the unresponsive grandmother. It is this which undoes Min Min. She is the one who organizes the schedule ("It's your turn to talk to Grandma ..."), and yet when it comes to be her turn, she finds that she has nothing, zero, to say. N.J. returns home one night after a business meeting to find his wife in tears. The actress has a tour de force of a breakdown. It is one of those cinematic moments when you forget you are watching an actress who has memorized lines. As she speaks, her sense of disconnection and grief and loss intensifies, and it goes to an even deeper level for her. She is hysterical. It brought me to tears watching it. What she says to her husband is:

I have nothing to say to Mother. I tell her the same things every day. What I did in th emorning, in the afternoon, in the evening. It only takes a minute. I can't bear it. I have so little. How can it be so little? I live a blank! Every day ... every day ... I'm like a fool! What am I doing every day? If I ended up like her one day ...

It is heartwrenching. Especially "How can it be so little?" How can describing my day - meaning: my life, the life that I live ... take so little time? Why isn't my life bigger? Why doesn't anything ever HAPPEN? "What am I doing every day?" It's a fantastic scene, amazing acting. Here's the thing about it: The fallout from this scene is that Min Min does go off to the temple, following a guru who promises spiritual enlightenment (the same guru recommended by her coworker). It is clear that she has had a nervous breakdown and needs to recover. So there must be a scene which shows her cracking up, a scene which gives us a glimpse of not only the loss and sadness which colors her every move, but the paralysis as to what to do about it. Where did she go wrong? How could her life be so little? It must make sense that this paralyzed woman, on autopilot, would suddenly decamp from her family and all of her obligations, and go off to live in a temple with a guru. This scene of breakdown helps us understand. The actress shows us that this is sadness that one does not recover from. You don't "bounce back" from a breakdown like that. It's not your garden-variety crying jag. Min Min has never before cried like this, or about this subject - and once she lets a little bit of it out, there's no recovery.

N.J. and Min Min have a teenage daughter named Ting Ting, played with heartfelt subtlety by Kelly Lee. She is haunted by the fact that a small blunder on her part (forgetting to take the trash out at her grandmother's) may have led to her grandmother falling ill. She can't tell anyone. But she knows. She knows what she did. It was an accident, but it eats away at her. In the middle of the night, she slips down to her grandmother's sick room, where her grandmother lies in a coma. In one of the few closeups of the film (it is mostly filmed in long shot, rather disorienting at first - if you're used to the director doing all the work for you, telling where to look and when - Yang doesn't do that), she sits in the darkness, and tells her grandmother of her guilt and how sorry she is. Meanwhile, she is doing a project for school, where she has to keep a plant alive. She struggles with it. It sits on her desk, straggly and struggling. Her classmates have bursting flowers and overflowing green coming out of their little plants, but not hers. This may sound overly obvious, and it is - but Yang handles it as a story element, as so often in life things become inter-connected. How often in life do we have a struggle, and suddenly we look around and everything in our lives appear to be symbolizing that struggle? You have a hard time, and the fact that your printer breaks down, or that you can't get someone on the phone at the DMV, or whatever, becomes a metaphor for that deeper emotional crisis. This is what Ting Ting's plant becomes for her (without any dialogue - none of it is on the nose). But she sits at her desk, doing homework, and you see that plant, on the sill, tiny, with only a couple of green leaves. Why won't it bloom? She also has her own secret journey, an adolescent trying to separate herself from her parents, who obviously are having their own problems and not paying attention to her. Her friend is in the midst of a tempestuous romance, with lots of screaming fights (where they say things like, "Fuck you, bitch" to one another), and it all seems frightfully grownup and appealing to the shy Ting Ting. She is drawn to the boyfriend of her friend. Secretly, they start to see each other, going to a concert and then out for coffee afterwards. He seems like a very different person, more subdued and sweet, in her presence. And when it comes time to maybe have sex, he can't go through with it. It's not right. This is all part of Ting Ting's growing-up process, which is seen in acute relief at this moment in her life since, obviously, she doesn't have her mother to rely on anymore. And would she confide in her mother anyway? Was her mother the type who could give sex advice or relationship advice? I loved Ting Ting's sections of the film, which, again, are often shot in long shot, Ting Ting seen from a great distance, outside windows, or through a plate glass.

Most of the shots, in the film, have some sort of interference involved with the line of vision. The characters are seen reflected in windows with the nighttime skyline of Taipei glimmering in the glass, so that we cannot see them clearly. Or we see them through the glass of the coffee shop, the camera out on the sidewalk, the actors inside. As I mentioned, you can count the closeups in Yi Yi on your two hands.

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They are used very sparingly. Important emotional scenes are filmed from all the way across the park, the two characters seen as small silhouettes surrounded by the landscape, dwarfed, and the voices come at us from across the space. The sound editing for a film like this must have been quite a job.

N.J.'s family is rounded out by little Yang Yang, played by Jonathan Chang, with that kind of preternatural ability that some child actors have. It's a serious business, being a child. How do you make sense of your world? Or the incomprehensible behavior of adults? Edward Yang takes Yang Yang seriously; in many ways, Yang Yang is the budding filmmaker, the autobiographical hook. He is just a little boy but he is fascinated with photography. Not for the art of it, but because he can't understand events, if he could only try to SEE them, maybe it all would become clear. He also becomes fixated on the fact that nobody knows what the back of their own head looks like, so he decides to take pictures of the backs of people's heads - "to help them" he explains to his father, in a moment so sweet and true it brought tears to my eyes. Jonathan Chang is so adorable, so in his face, the way children can be, and Yang handles him perfectly. He must be wonderful with children - just a guess. He treats Yang Yang's curiosity and also his troubles at school (being teased by a group of saucy girls) with seriousness and no condescension. Yang Yang's journey here is just as important and serious as that of his mother Min Min's, with her crackup.

N.J.'s brief encounter with his old love in the elevator starts to expand in his mind, especially with the departure of his wife. It becomes clear that 30 years ago, he and Sherry had dated, briefly and intensely, and then, for some unknown reason, he left her. Without a word as to why. He has heard through the grapevine that she did not take it well, and that, in some way, it has become the defining element of her life. She never fully recovered. She is now married to a successful American businessman, but all you have to do is watch her body language in the elevator when she sees NJ, to realize that feelings for him still vibrate. She has moved on, on the surface of it. Because what else is she going to do? But it was a wound. To quote Cat Stevens, "The first cut is the deepest."

I really felt for her.

And I felt for N.J., too. Over the course of the film you start to realize that he is living a default life, not the life he would have chosen. He had never questioned, "Is this the life I want?" until the events of the wedding went down, and the repercussions began to reverberate.

He has a couple of business dinners with a wealthy Japanese software innovator named Ota, played by Issei Ogata. To my mind, except for little Yang Yang (and, perhaps, the grandmother), Ota is the only character in the movie who appears to be living the life that he has dreamt of. Not because he's successful and rich, although he is those things, not because he is lucky or has good fortune - no, it's because he appears to be actively engaged with his own subtext. He does not spend the majority of his time on earth, like so many of us do (and certainly like most characters in Yi Yi do) trying to ACTIVELY avoid what is REALLY going on. The only way to get over a lost love is to eat that pain and find someone else. Grit your teeth and bear it. That is, if someone else equally as awesome doesn't come along. But Ota, in his gentle manner of doing business (he is a curious man, patient, and he seems to pick up on emotions in the way that other characters do not), in his easy way of incorporating WHO HE IS into the business of WHAT HE DOES ... seems to have found a kind of peace with himself. He doesn't Deepak Chopra it up, he's not egotistical about it or a pontificator. He just appears to live life on a deep level, in touch with emotions, not just actions. The two men go out to a cheesy karaoke bar, and after watching people bumble their way through "Proud Mary" or whatever, Ota goes up onto the stage, sits at the piano (in a very unassuming shy way) and slowly, feelingly, starts to play Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata". And in that slick neon-lit atmosphere, it is clear that something else has entered the room. Something true, and real, full of memory and kindness and sadness. Ota makes space for ALL things in his life, not just the comfortable things, the easily-known things. N.J., a man who tries to shut out the world by listening to classical music on his headphones, looks on from the bar, a world of emotion and thought on his face. Ota has somehow incorporated art, and his love for it, into his life, where he maneuvers in the cutthroat world of new technology and international business deals. This is merely suggested, in Ota's behavior, and how he plays the piano, how he listens to N.J., how he does business.

It is no coincidence that after the night with Ota, listening to him play the piano in the bar, that N.J. goes to his office in the middle of the night and calls his old love, Sherry, leaving a message on her answering machine. His words gripped my throat. It is so much what I am dealing with right now, and also is so much what I have been working on in that script of mine.

Sherry? It's me, NJ. I'm glad it's the machine. Otherwise I'd be tongue-tied. Da Da said he spoke to you. He says you're doing well, I'm so glad. Before, I'd heard your life was tough. I felt it might be my fault. You asked why I vanished without a word 30 years ago. There were many reasons. Now they all sound stupid. I'm glad that you have a good life. I'm really happy for you. All my best wishes.

Yi Yi, with its web of stories, its numerous characters, and languid pace, is an experience, rather than a story. By the end of the film, there is an almost transcendent experience of having gotten to know these people, and also of being given an opportunity to go deeper into our own lives, to examine our motivations, our losses, to try - try hard - to see the backs of our own heads.

Because who knows what's going on back there? We can't ever see it, not without "help", from a mirror or a photo, or a film like Yi Yi, perhaps, but it's a worthwhile goal. To at least try.

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Winter solstice at Newgrange: "Nobody knows, love."

Today is the winter solstice which makes me think of a lot of things - the winter solstice parties we had in college and stuff like that, but mainly it makes me think of Newgrange, a place I have been to numerous times (I have a picture on my fridge of me and Jean at Newgrange - taken by Siobhan):

Here is my impression of being on a tour at Newgrange, which has gone down in just this manner pretty much every time I have gone there. You have to imagine the thick Irish brogues to really get the effect.

American accent: "So ... what do all these spirals signify?"

Irish accent: "Well, we don't really know. But aren't they lovely?"

American accent: "And what exactly happened in these recesses? Were they burial tombs, or ..."

Irish accent: "Well, actually, nobody knows, love."

American accent: "These standing stones are amazing. Why did they place them like that?"

Irish accent: "Well, we don't really know."

Literally. The tour went on like that for 45 minutes. It was positively charming. I loved every second of it. Basically the theme was: Nobody knows what the hell went on here, but isn't it lovely?

One of the most amazing places I've ever been. I highly recommend it to you all. Here are 101 facts about New grange. I guess there are some things that "we know".

I have a couple of wee goals in life - not really personal achievement goals - but things I would like to see, and one of them is I would love to be there at Newgrange (with all the crowds) on the winter solstice - to see the sun illuminate the inner tomb. What happens is - on the winter solstice - you can buy a ticket to hang out either around New grange - or within the inner tomb (I think the waiting list is years long) - and at sunrise (which, in Ireland, is an iffy prospect - it's usually rainy during winter solstice) the sun enters the main door, crawls up the passageway, and FLOODS the inner tomb with light. They recreate it during the tour (where the ongoing theme is "Well, nobody really knows, love"). You can't believe the geometry of the place, the architecture ... that it would be created in such a manner that light would crawl UP the pathway and then flood into the inner chamber, lighting it as though it were from electric power. Who WERE these people?

The fact that "nobody knows" is what makes the place so special, so magical.

An ancient and important site.

You know what I felt at Newgrange, standing in the pitch black with my sisters, in that ancient tomb, with the spiral rock carvings above and below us, waiting for the light to crawl up the slanting passage? I felt: Man. It is awesome to be a member of the human race. Humans are absolutely beyond belief. I am really PROUD of us. Even though we can't know what exactly drove those ancient people to create such a structure - we can marvel at their knowledge, their spirit, their drive. They are in an unending continuum with this event. It's the same impetus. They knew to build the inner passageway at just the right slant upwards - so that the sun could crawl upwards and flood the inner passageway and inner "tomb" (or whatever it was) for the maximum amount of time. When you duck down under the entrance stone, and enter the darkness - you feel the path go on a steep incline. You are inside the earth, walking UP. How did they know? Well, they just did. And I am just proud of the human race for all of that. What a mystery we are. What a neverending and curious mystery.

American accent: "And ... sorry ... I know we've covered this ... but what was going on with those spirals??"

Irish accent, "Oh, love, nobody really knows."

The whole "winter solstice event" at Newgrange is something I have always wanted to do - even though it's nigh on impossible to get a ticket, and you have to do a "solstice draw", like a lottery - to see if you'll be able to be one of the lucky few. And of course since it's Ireland in December, there is no guarantee that there will even be sun on that day. But when there is? Magic. Goosebump-magic.

On the tour of Newgrange, when you are in the inner chamber, they turn off all the lights - and do a recreation of what it would look like if you were there on the sunrise at winter solstice. But to see it with the actual sun? As the people who built the mysterious structure would have seen it? Now that would be something.

Newgrange is a passage tomb north of Dublin. There are quite a few other passage tombs up there, but Newgrange is the biggest and most famous. You've probably seen photos of the rocks inside that are covered with spirals. Who knows why these ancient people were into spirals - but it's psychedelic and arresting to see. The spirals are everywhere. You go into the inner chamber via a small narrow passageway - with earthen floor - and the path gently slopes up (a very important element in the winter solstice miracle. The mathematical and astronomical sophistication of the ancients is something to stand in awe before.) So what happened on the winter solstice is: when you are inside the inner chamber (and there are indentations all around - with big scooped-out spaces - nobody knows what was done there - were they graves of important community members? Nobody knows, love) - But anyway, it's pitch black in there. And on the winter solstice, when the sun rises (and it's not a rainy or misty day, etc.) - slow rays of light creep thru the open passage door - and crawl up the path (if the path were not on an incline, this miracle would not work) - and then when the rays reach the inner chamber, the whole thing is FLOODED with light. Light literally pours into the darkness. It pours UP the path, ray by ray ... and then reaches the inner chamber and everything bursts into visibility. How did they know? Why did they build it? What were they doing? It's an amazing place. Being at Newgrange is like being in the presence of the Pyramids or Stone Henge or any of those other monolithic structures filled with sophistication and symbols and ancient wisdom ... and to see the rays of sun slowly illuminate the entire chamber, hidden deep within the earth ... Just makes you feel all humble and awestruck and quiet.

And every winter solstice crowds of people gather at Newgrange - from all over the world. Only a lucky few get spots in the inner chamber - where you can probably fit 15 people, maybe 20. You have to draw slots - and there are waiting lists of years to get those spots. But many people just camp out on the chilly grass in front of the passage tomb, to watch the sun rise from there. How amazing it would be, though, to be one of the folks inside. To watch the sun fill up the earthen chamber ... just like the ancients did. Must be amazing!

Here are some pictures from past winter solstices at Newgrange:

That's from within the inner corridor that slopes upward into the chamber. When the sun first peeks over the horizon - the sun rays pierce through the main door like a laser. Unbelievable.

Slowly, as the sun rises - the rays continue to flood forward - going around slight curves, slowly rising up the corridor ... Eventually the inner chamber floods with light as bright as day. It's incredible.

And here's a view of Newgrange from the outside, winter solstice 2002.

Happy solstice.

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December 20, 2009

5:30 a.m.

First snowfall.

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Happy birthday, Maud Gonne

Maud Gonne, Irish revolutionary, feminist, radical, and lifelong poetic muse of William Butler Yeats, was born on this day in history in 1865. She married John MacBride (after a couple of notorious affairs and illegitimate children). John MacBride was an Irish nationalist who participated in the Easter Rising of 1916 and was executed by firing squad. Although Gonne and MacBride had apparently separated by the time of the Easter Rising, she wore mourning garb for the rest of her life. She was wedded to Irish nationalism. There was a bit of the death-cult about her.

Conor Cruise O'Brien writes in his memoir about Maud Gonne McBride:

When the husband, whom she loathed, was shot by a British firing squad after the Easter Rising, Madame MacBride - as she now came to be known - attired herself from head to toe in the most spectacular set of widow's weeds ever seen in Dublin, to which she returned from Paris in 1917. Her mourning for Major John MacBride was so intense that it lasted all the remaining years of her life (nearly forty of them), as far as outward appearances were concerned. I still remember her as I first saw her in that garb, about ten years later in Leinster Road, Rathmines. With her great height and noble carriage, her pale beaked gaunt face, and large lustrous eyes, and gliding along in that great flapping cloud of black, she seemed like the Angel of Death: or more precisely, like the crow-like bird, the Morrigu, that heralds death in the Gaelic sagas. That is how I think of that vision in retrospect; at the time I just thought: 'spooky'!

But of course, we know "of" Maud Gonne not because of these events (and she already would have earned her place in history as an extraordinary woman in her own right) - but because of W.B. Yeats' immortalizing of her in poem ... after poem .... after poem .... after poem .... after poem .... after poem .....

It's one of the greatest unrequited love affairs of all time. Great, merely because of the art it inspired.

Seamus Heaney writes about the mystical connection W.B. Yeats shared with Maud Gonne (a connection that he had all his life):

And all the while, of course, there was Maud Gonne, "high and solitary and most stern" according to one of the poems about her, "foremost among those I would hear praised" according to another, and "the troubling of my life" according to a famous sentence in his Autobiographies. The passion she inspired - and as readers we experience it more as creative power than erotic need - made her a figure of primary poetic radiance, a Dublin Beatrice, an archetype as much as a daily presence. Nevertheless, Yeats's poetry, his politics and his involvement with the occult received an extra charge of intensity from her day to day reality in his life, and when she appeared in the title role of his subversive play Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), another kind of maturity was achieved.

They never married, although Yeats asked her multiple times. Later on in life, he even considered asking Gonne's daughter to marry him.

Yeats and Gonne met in 1889 and he would say later that that was the year that "the troubling of my life began". Oh man.

Maud Gonne, of course, makes me think of Dad. On my father's shelf in his study is a big hardcover book with MAUD GONNE on the spine. It has been there always. I have memorized my dad's bookshelves, and know the spines of most of them, the ones that have been there since childhood. I own that MAUD GONNE book too (it is by Samuel Levenson).

Samuel Levenson writes:

No one who knew her in the days of her glory is now alive. But many Irish men and women recall her in her later years as one of Dublin's most extraordinary personalities - part eccentric, part heroine. They remember her as a tall, gaunt woman in black robes speaking on Dublin street corners about her current political or economic obsession. And they have not forgotten the stories they heard from their elders about her unconventional life in Paris, her constant cigarette smoking, the dogs and birds with which she surrounded herself, her affair with a French politician, her illegitimate children, her marriage to Irish patriot John MacBride, and the scandal of her separation from him.
Some remember Maud Gonne's activities to house evicted tenant farmers, feed school children, aid political prisoners, find homes for Catholic refugees from Northern Ireland, establish a fully independent Irish Republic, and end partition between Northern and Southern Ireland. Few recall the names of the women's organizations and publications she founded, or the number of times she went to prison. And some confuse her with another tall Ascendancy woman who took up the Irish cause after a fling in Paris - the Gore-Booth girl, who came back with a Polish count named Markievicz. But they all know that the word "maudgonning" means agitating for a cause in a reckless flamboyant fashion.

Maud herself wished to be thought of as an Irish patriot. She was hailed in her lifetime as an Irish Joan of Arc, and would have been happy to be remembered as such for all time. A quarter of a century after her death, controversy surrounds the importance of her contributions to the Irish nation and its people. The scandal that still hovers around her name has grown dim. But it is neither her activities in Ireland's behalf, her unconventionality, nor her striking beauty that give her a place in history. It is, rather, the obsessive pursuit of her by the greatest poet of the era, William Butler Yeats. Her steadfast rejection of his proposals bit so deeply into his soul that he never ceased to fashion glorious poetry about her beauty, her talents, and the mystery of her personality. She was to Yeats what Beatrice was to Dante. And thus, Yeats made her a permanent figure of romance and myth throughout the English-speaking world.

Here is another of Yeats' "Gonne poems":

Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
by William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

On January 31, 1889, Yeats wrote to his friend John O'Leary, after having dinner with Maud:

"She is not only very handsome but very clever. Though her politics in European matters be a little sensational ... It was pleasant however to hear her attacking a young military man from India who was there, on English rule in India. She is very Irish, a kind of 'Diana of the Crossways.' Her pet monkey was making, much of the time, little melancholy cries at the hearthrug ... It was you, was it not, who converted Miss Gonne to her Irish opinions. She herself will make many converts."

On February 3, he wrote to Ellen O'Leary:

"Did I tell you how much I admire Maud Gonne? ... If she said the world was flat or the moon an old caubeen tossed up into the sky I would be proud to be of her party."

And so it began.

"The Arrow", one of the many poems Yeats wrote for Gonne, goes:

I THOUGHT of your beauty, and this arrow,
Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.
There's no man may look upon her, no man,
As when newly grown to be a woman,
Tall and noble but with face and bosom
Delicate in colour as apple blossom.
This beauty's kinder, yet for a reason
I could weep that the old is out of season.

Yeats mythologized her. Not just her beauty, but her essence, her soul. Gonne was right. It was a "spiritual union".

Gonne didn't have as clear a memory of their first meeting. At that point, she was far more formidable than he was. He was 23 years old, a young poet, a nobody. She had already lived in Paris, had become notorious, was at the forefront of the new movement that Yeats would eventually help champion.

Gonne's impressions of Yeats in that first meeting:

" ... a tall lanky boy with deep-set dark eyes behind glasses, over which a lock of dark hair was constantly falling, to be pushed back impatiently by long sensitive fingers, often stained with paint - dressed in shabby clothes ..."

They were never not in touch, through their long lives. They wrote long letters to one another, describing their dreams - wondering if the other had dreamt the same thing. Kindred spirits. In 1908, Gonne wrote to Yeats from Paris:

"I had such a wonderful experience last night that I must know at once if it affected you & how? At a quarter of 11 last night I put on this body & thought strongly of you & desired to go to you.”

Connection across the space-time continuum? They would experiment with it, wondering if the connection could be felt. I often think that unrequited love is far better for art than anything that works out in a normal or domesticated fashion. If Gonne had married Yeats, would he have written all of those poems? If he had ready access to her over the breakfast table, in the marriage bed ... would she have been elevated to such a poetic height in his consciousness? Perhaps Gonne sensed this herself. After one of his many proposals, she wrote to him:

"You would not be happy with me. ... You make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and you are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry."

She very well may have been wiser than he.

Her commitment to his work was paramount. Marriage or no, they would always have that. She seemed to understand where much of it came from (his love of her), and not only encouraged it, but pushed him even further. She wrote to him in 1911:

"Our children were your poems of which I was the father sowing the unrest & storm which made them possible & you the mother who brought them forth in suffering & in the highest beauty."

Love the gender flip-flop there. She as father, he as mother.

25 years after that first meeting, Yeats would write:

I was twenty-three years old when the troubling of my life began. I had heard from time to time in letters from Miss O'Leary, John O'Leary's old sister, of a beautiful girl who had left the society of the Viceregal Court for Dublin nationalism. In after years I persuaded myself that I felt premonnitory excitement at the first reading of her name. Presently she drove up to our house in Bedford Park ... I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past. A complexion like the blossom of apples, and yet face and body had the beauty of lineaments which Blake calls the highest beauty because it changes least from youth to age, and a stature so great that she seemed of a divine race. Her movements were worthy of her form, and I understood at last why the poet of antiquity, where we would but speak of face and form, sings, loving some lady, that she paces like a goddess.

Samuel Levenson writes:

In his recollections, Yeats thought that there was, even at their first meetings, something in Maud's manner that was declamatory, "Latin in a bad sense," and possibly unscrupulous. She seemed to desire power for its own sake, to win elections for the sake of winning. Her goals were unselfish, he recalled, but, unlike the Indian sage who said, "Only the means can justify the end," Maud was ready to adopt any means that promised to be successful.
He made two observations, which doubtless owe something to discoveries he made as their relationship progressed:

We were seeking different things: she, some memorable action for final consecration of her youth, and I, after all, but to discover and communicate a state of being ... Her two and twenty years had taken some color, I thought, from French Boulangist adventurers and journlist arrivistes of whom she had seen too much.

Yeats remembered Maud Gonne as the herald of the movement to revive Celtic culture. "I have seen the enchanted day / And heard the morning bugles blow," he wrote in his manuscript book.

Jim Dwyer wrote in a recent New York Times article:

Until nearly the end of his days he and Gonne kept an eye on each other. In 1938 he wrote “A Bronze Head” about her frequent appearances at political funerals, a “dark tomb-haunter,” so transformed from the light, gentle woman of his memory.
Almost from the beginning she had been a figure of memory. In the opening pages of the 1908 notebook he looked backward: “She said something that blotted away the recent past & brought all back to the spiritual marriage of 1898. She believed that this bond is to be recreated & to be the means of spiritual illumination between us. It is to be a bond of the spirit only.”

A Bronze Head

HERE at right of the entrance this bronze head,
Human, superhuman, a bird's round eye,
Everything else withered and mummy-dead.
What great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky
(Something may linger there though all else die;)
And finds there nothing to make its tetror less
i{Hysterica passio} of its own emptiness?

No dark tomb-haunter once; her form all full
As though with magnanimity of light,
Yet a most gentle woman; who can tell
Which of her forms has shown her substance right?
Or maybe substance can be composite,
profound McTaggart thought so, and in a breath
A mouthful held the extreme of life and death.

But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,
I saw the wildness in her and I thought
A vision of terror that it must live through
Had shattered her soul. Propinquity had brought
Imagiation to that pitch where it casts out
All that is not itself: I had grown wild
And wandered murmuring everywhere, 'My child, my
child! '

Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall;
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave,
And wondered what was left for massacre to save.

Here is, perhaps, the most famous poem Yeats wrote for her. It is impossible for me to read this without tears coming to my eyes.

When You are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Happy birthday to this fierce complex "pilgrim soul", she who is so much a part of the warp and weft of my entire life.

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December 19, 2009

Snowy Morning/Afternoon iPod Shuffle

Christmas preparations, all morning. Listening to music the whole time, and it was a pretty damn fun shuffle, have to say. Strange clusters. I could do without the Mary Poppins songs coming up so often, but other than that, no complaints.

"Outshined" - Soundgarden

"Seether" - Veruca Salt

"Too Late Too Late" - Metallica

"Crawl" - Kings of Leon

"Science Can't Be Coy" - Siobhan O'Malley

"Brilliant Petty Crime" - Siobhan O'Malley (love it - back to back!!)

"Go To the Mirror" - The Who (Tommy)

"Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" - Bono

"How the Other Half Lives" - Sutton Foster and cast, Thoroughly Modern Millie - speaking of ...

"Everything" - Michael Buble

"Overkill" - Metallica

"The Deal (No Deal)" - Marti Bellow, Idina Menzel & Josh Groban, from Chess: Live in Concert

"Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2" - Pink Floyd

"One Mint Julep" - Ray Charles

"Defy You" - The Offspring

"Chicago Shake" - The Bruce Fowler Big Band

"Purple Haze" - Jimi Hendrix

"Take It All" - Marion Cotillard (from Nine soundtrack)

"Give Me the Creeps" - Siobhan O'Malley (video here!)

"Maybe Your Baby's Got the Blues" - The Judds

"Something" - Jim Sturgess (from Across the Universe soundtrack)

"Don't Stand So Close to Me" - the Glee cast (well, all of them except cousin Mike, blast it)

"Sunglasses at Night" - Corey Hart

"Eclipse" - Pink Floyd

"You and I (reprise)" - Idina Menzel & Josh Groban, from Chess: Live in Concert

"Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)" - Beyonce

"Not for the Life Of Me" - Sutton Foster, Thoroughly Modern Millie

"Our New Year" - Tori Amos

"Finale" - from Nine (the movie soundtrack)

"What a Piece of Work is Man / How Dare They Try" - cast of new Broadway production of Hair (which totally rocks)

"Halleluia I Love Her So" - Ray Charles

"Love What You Do" - The Divine Comedy

"Dio" - Tenacious D

"Nasty Letter" - Otis Taylor

"I Want To Hold Your Hand" - TV Carpio (from Across the Universe)

"Do You Believe In Love (live)" - Huey Lewis & the News

"I Hope I Get It" - cast of original Broadway production of A Chorus Line

"Another State of Mind" - Green Day

"Tommy's Holiday Camp" - The Who, from Tommy

"What I Did For Love" - Priscilla Lopez, from A Chorus Line

"Threesome" - The Divine Comedy

"Dear Lover" - Foo Fighters

"Jesus Christ Pose" - Soundgarden

"POD" - Tenacious D

"If I Fell" - Evan Rachel Wood (from Across the Universe)

"Let the Sun Shine In" - cast of Broadway revival of Hair

"You're Quiet" - Brendan Benson

"Sittin' Pretty" - Brendan Benson

"Isn't He a Strange One" - The Judds

"Unusual Way" - Nicole Kidman (from Nine) - God, this song is so heartbreaking ("It scares me so that I can hardly speak...")

"Sister Suffragette" - Glynis Johns, from Mary Poppins

"Broken Boy Soldiers" - The Raconteurs

"Jesus Was a Democrat" - Everclear

"Karate Schnitzel" - Tenacious D

"My Darling" - Eminem

"Just For a Thrill" - Ray Charles

"I Am the Walrus" - Bono (from Across the Universe)

"Board Meeting" - Timbaland (featuring Magoo)

"Truly Scrumptious" - from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

"Flavor" - Tori Amos

"Underture" - The Who (Tommy - uhm, it's a Tommy cluster!)

"I'm Blessed" - Brendan Benson

"Hide Nor Hair" - Ray Charles

"Jolly Holiday" - Dick van Dyke and Julie Andrews, Mary Poppins

"Black Boys" - from new Broadway production of Hair - rockin'

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Sissy Spacek in "Badlands": an analysis

Roger Ebert writes in his review of Terrence Malick's great film Badlands:

She claimed she was kidnapped and forced to go along with Starkweather. When they first were captured, he asked the deputies to leave her alone: "She didn't do nothing." Later, at his trial, he claimed she was the most trigger-happy person he ever knew, and was responsible for some of the killings. It is a case that is still not closed, although "Badlands" sees her as a child of vast simplicity who went along at first because she was flattered that he liked her: "I wasn't popular at school on account of having no personality and not being pretty."

Badlands is narrated by Holly, but we don't get much information from her. It's flat. Tired-out. There is no introspection in her. She appears to just be passively reacting to events. The accepted "narrative" of these two spree-killers is that Kit (played by Martin Sheen) was the real loose cannon, and she was just along for the ride because she loved him. Are they in the grand tradition of criminal pairings (like I talked about here)? Or are they something totally different? Kit is painted as the truly bad guy (albeit damaged and blunted by life), but what about her? What is it like to be her? How does she react to things? What is HER damage? Sissy Spacek (and Malick) work subversively here, leaving most of the script uneloquent on her reasoning, which makes her a pretty frightening character. I WANT to see her as "kidnapped", almost, but that's not the case. She participates, even in her ultimate passivity. Doing nothing is also participation, when you are on a killing spree. But her motives remain mysterious. You don't see evidence of a grand passion (the way you do in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, or even Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers - where it is obviously the alchemy of the two personalities that jumpstarts them) - you don't see her operating under any kind of NORMAL or recognizable motivation: love, yearning for a home, a partner - even flat-out boredom - none of those things seem to occur to this freckled flat-eyed teenager. In a way, it is Sissy Spacek's most creepy performance.

I just finished reading Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, by Robert Hare, the leading expert in psychopaths in, perhaps, the world. His name comes up all the time if you research psychopaths, which, uhm, I do. His book is fantastic, by the way, highly recommended - and certainly makes me think of two psychopaths I have known (I described the behavior of one of them here - uhm, Irony?). An interesting point that Hare makes, repeatedly, is the controversy around the term "psycho" and what it has come to mean in our culture, and why the preferred term (at least legalistically) is usually "sociopath" - because "psycho" has connotations of crazy, off-the-wall, going NUTS, and not being in control of your faculties. Psychopaths are always in control. They are not "insane", as "psycho" would have you think.

It's a really good book, with many fascinating case studies (of "successful" psychopaths - meaning those who have never broken the law, a rare breed - because they fly under the radar, and yet they still destroy lives - and then the more garden-variety "unsuccessful" versions, filling up the prison population) - and Hare resists "diagnosing" people that he doesn't know. People come to him all the time with "is so and so a psychopath", and he can't say, without having studied the individual himself. Hannibal Lecter comes up a lot, as the modern-day version of what people think a "psychopath" is. He cautions against that limited interpretation, because you may miss what is going on right in front of you, because the person doesn't SEEM like a "psycho". One of the defining characteristics of a psychopath is "charm". It may be glib or superficial, but it can certainly work upon you, if you do not pick up on the other signals. Many of them are highly skilled in diffusing suspicion. Their emotions are shallow, they do not understand things such as love or empathy. Hare quotes psychologists J.H. Johns and H.C. Quay, who wrote famously that psychopaths "know the words but not the music".

Truman Capote in In Cold Blood creates one of the most indelible portraits of a psychopath that I can think of - not in the delusional damaged Perry Smith, who may seem more openly "insane", with his visions of a great avenging bird, and his fantasies of scuba-diving for sunken treasure - he seems "nuts" - but, it is really Dick Hickock who is the textbook "psychopath". Cold, glib ("Matt, Matt, Matt, you're glib..."), deceitful, and charming as hell. Capote felt it when he was in his presence.

Many people who routinely work with people who score high on Hare's psychopath checklist report feeling a strange skin-crawling sensation when in the presence of these people. I have no statistics to back this up, but I would warrant a guess that that skin-crawling feeling (reported by multiple people, remember) has some evolutionary purpose. Something deep and survival-based. The feeling Rikki-Tikki-Tavi got when he made eye contact with the cobra, perhaps. Get away from this creature. Either kill it, or RUN.

Gavin de Becker talks about the "gift of fear". Fear like that tells us when something is wrong. Listen. It is a gift from millions of years of evolution. Take that, Kirk Cameron.

One of the best fictional portraits of a psychopath in the history of literature is Steinbeck's Cathy (even just the name gives me the creeps) in East of Eden. I was surprised that Hare did not reference it in his book, since he does use multiple examples from literature and film. Steinbeck, in his Biblical allegory, is certainly making a connection between psychopaths and the Devil. Cathy has the Devil in her. She is cool, calculated, gorgeous (the perfect smokescreen), and lies. Not just to get out of things. But she lies because she can. She lies indiscriminately (one of the defining characteristics of a psychopath). They lie so often that those listening to them, operating from their own assumptions of sanity, and how normal people behave, sometimes get caught up in it. We are not used to dealing with such creatures (thank God). They have a tendency to fool everyone: parole officers, prison officials, social workers ... They are masters of deception. And yet, often, people cannot put their finger on what is "off", what is wrong. Steinbeck in East of Eden writes:

Cathy was chewing a piece of meat, chewing with her front teeth. Samuel had never seen anyone chew that way before. And when she swallowed, her little tongue flicked around her lips. Samuel's mind repeated, "Something - something - can't find what it is. Something's wrong," and the silence hung on the table.

This is a textbook response to people like this, according to Hare: Something's "off". But what? What exactly is "wrong"? You can't point right at it, but you know it's there. A skin-crawling sensation the only indication that perhaps you are in the presence of something quite different from your garden-variety human being.

I wrote about Cathy here.

Steinbeck doesn't mince words. Here is how he introduces Cathy:

I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one's fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishment for concealed sins.
And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.

It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighed, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth. And just as a cripple may learn to utilize his lack so that he becomes more effective in a limited field than the uncrippled, so did Cathy, using her difference, make a painful and bewildering stir in her world.

There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community. The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability to distress people, to make them restless and uneasy and even envious.

As though nature concealed a trap, Cathy had from the first a face of innocence. Her hair was gold and lovely; wide-set hazel eyes with upper lids that drooped made her look mysteriously sleepy. Her nose was delicate and thin, and her cheekbones high and wide, sweeping down to a small chin so that her face was heart-shaped. Her mouth was well shaped and well lipped but abnormally small -- what used to be called a rosebud. Her ears were very little, without lobes, and they pressed so close to her head that even with her hair combed up they made no silhouette. They were thin flaps sealed against her head.

Cathy always had a child's figure even after she was grown, slender, delicate arms and hands -- tiny hands. Her breasts never developed much. Before her puberty the nipples turned inward. Her mother had to manipulate them out when they became painful in Cathy's tenth year. Her body was a boy's body, narrow-hipped, straight-legged, but her ankles were thin and straight without being slender. Her feet were small and round and stubby, with fat insteps almost like little hoofs. She was a pretty child and she became a pretty woman. Her voice was huskily soft, and it could be so sweet as to be irresistible. But there must have been some steel cord in her throat, for Cathy's voice could cut like a file when she wished.

Even as a child she had some quality that made people look at her, then look away, then look back at her, troubled at something foreign. Something looked out of her eyes, and was never there when one looked again. She moved quietly and talked little, but she could enter no room without causing everyone to turn toward her.

She made people uneasy but not so that they wanted to go away from her. Men and women wanted to inspect her, to be close to her, to try and find what caused the disturbance she distributed so subtly. And since this had always been so, Cathy did not find it strange.

Cathy was different from other children in many ways, but one thing in particular set her apart. Most children abhor difference. They want to look, talk, dress, and act exactly like all of the others. If the style of dress is an absurdity, it is pain and sorrow to a child not to wear that absurdity. If necklaces of pork chops were accepted, it would be a sad child who could not wear pork chops. And this slavishness to the group normally extends into every game, every practice, social or otherwise. It is a protective coloration children utilize for their safety.

Cathy had none of this. She never conformed in dress or conduct. She wore whatever she wanted to. The result was that quite often other children imitated her.

As she grew older the group, the herd, which is any collection of children, began to sense what adults felt, that there was something foreign about Cathy. After a while only one person at a time associated with her. Groups of boys and girls avoided her as though she carried a nameless danger.

Cathy was a liar, but she did not lie the way most children do. Hers was no daydream lying, when the thing imagined is told and, to make it seem more real, told as real. That is just ordinary deviation from external reality. I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar -- if he is financially fortunate.

Cathy's lies were never innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility, and they were used for profit. Most liars are tripped up either because they forget what they have told or because the lie is suddenly faced with an incontrovertible truth. But Cathy did not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of lying. She stayed close enough to the truth so that one could never be sure. She knew two other methods also -- either to interlard her lies with truth or to tell a truth as though it were a lie. If one is accused of a lie and it turns out to be the truth, there is a backlog that will last a long time and protect a number of untruths.

Since Cathy was an only child her mother had no close contrast in the family. She thought all children were like her own. And since all parents are worriers she was convinced that all her friends had the same problems.

Cathy's father was not so sure. He operated a small tannery in a town in Massachusetts, which made a comfortable, careful living if he worked very hard. Mr. Ames came in contact with other children away from his home and he felt that Cathy was not like other children. It was a matter more felt than known. He was uneasy about his daughter but he could not have said why.

Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface. And most people either hold such things in check or indulge them secretly. Cathy knew not only these impulses in others but how to use them for her own gain.

It is quite possible that she did not believe in any other tendencies in humans, for while she was preternaturally alert in some directions she was completely blind in others.

Back to Sissy Spacek in Badlands. In the middle of Without Conscience, which is basically a self-help book (How to Know If You are Dealing with a Psychopath, and How to Get the Hell Away From Them), Hare analyses the character of Holly in Badlands, from his perspective as a psychologist who has worked mainly in prisons. As he mentioned, he is not in the business of long-distance psychoanalyzing, but here, he shares a theory he has about the murderous duo portrayed in Badlands, and I found it startling and unusual. Something that isn't really in the preferred "narrative" of that particular film, which, as I mentioned, usually sees Kit as the leader, and Holly as the passive follower. Normally, I don't like film analysis such as this - which is trying to prove a specific point (that has nothing to do with the art of film-making). For example, a cultural conservative saying, "Such and such is a good movie because it presents core values that I agree with, and here's why ..." It's shallow and uninteresting, and more like an undergraduate thesis paper than actual film analysis. It is interested in things other than movies. But here, at least in Hare's thoughts on Badlands, I make an exception, because he takes the film at its word, first of all - and appears to be judging it as a work of art, not a case study. He sees its effectiveness, and also perceives an opportunity to illuminate the character of the elusive "psychopath", by talking about the film. He does it in such a manner that it really got my attention.

It's a way of looking at the characters of Kit and Holly (but especially Holly) that I have not seen spoken of before, in reviews of Badlands.

Check it out:

Terrence Malick's movie Badlands, loosely based on the killing career of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, is a chilling film fantasy with a coldly realistic core. The fantasy resides in the character of Kit Carruthers, whose irresistible charm and slick patter is absolutely consistent with the psychopathic profile but whose attachment to his girlfriend Holly runs too deep and strong to ring true. One might be tempted to dismiss this movie as the typical Hollywood romance of the psychopath with a heart of gold, but look again. Behind Kit sits Holly, strictly along for the ride. It takes a second viewing for the real case history to pop into the foreground: If Kit is the moviemaker's conception of a psychopath, Holly is the real thing, a true "other" brilliantly portrayed by Sissy Spacek as a talking mask.
Two aspects of Holly's character exemplify and dramatize important aspects of the psychopathic personality. One is her emotional impoverishment and the clear sense she conveys of simply going through the motions of feeling deeply. One clue is the sometimes outrageous inappropriateness of her behavior. After Kit guns down her father before her eyes for objecting to his presence in Holly'w life, the fifteen-year-old youngster slaps Kit's face. Later she flops into a chair and complains of a headache; later still she flees with Kit on a cross-country killing spree after he sets fire to her house to conceal her father's body.

In another example, with several more murders to his name now, Kit lazily separates a terrified couple from their car at gunpoint and directs them out into an empty field. Casually, Holly falls into step with the frightened woman. "Hi," she says, in her flat, childish voice. "What will happen?" asks the woman, desperate for some understanding of what's going on. "Oh," answers Holly, "Kit says he feels like he just might explode. I feel like that myself sometimes. Don't you?" The scene ends with Kit locking the two in a root cellar in the middle of the field. Just about to walk away, he suddenly shoots into the cellar door. "Think I got 'em?" he asks, as if swatting at flies in the dark.

Perhaps the film's most subtle evidence of psychopathy comes through in Holly's narration of the film, delivered in a monotone and embellished with phrases drawn straight from the glossies telling young girls what they should feel. Holly speaks of the love she and Kit share, but the actress manages somehow to convey the notion that Holly has no experiential knowledge of the feelings she reports. If there was ever an example of "knowing the words but not the music," Spacek's character is it, giving viewers a firsthand experience of the odd sensation, the unnamable distrust and skin-crawling feeling, that many - lay people and professionals alike - report after their interactions with psychopaths.

There is a great great compliment to Spacek there, in the simple phrase: "the actress manages somehow to convey ..."

It is the "somehow" that contains the compliment. The great mystery of great acting. "Somehow". Who knows HOW she does it. It doesn't even matter how.

I think that is a fine analysis of the creepiness (and also deeply insightful nature) of Spacek's work in that film.

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Happy birthday, Poor Richard's Almanack

On this day in history, December 19, 1732, Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack was born - and the first issue published. Franklin included all the information that almanacs normally provide - sun rise, sun set, eclipses, weather predictions. But it was also one of those small things (or - not so small - but let's just say that Richard's Almanack couldn't have done it on its own) that made the colonies into a community. The colonies did things for themselves. They were under the crown, but that feeling of being separate from the crown started very early (this due to geography, naturally, but the feeling of separation intensified into something more character-based, something more germane, later on) - and the almanac - with its listing of court dates, and town meetings, and church meetings, etc. - was part of that. It helped foster that. It helped spread information. It helped bind the colonies together. A benign thing, right? At first, yes. But you can see how that very sense of connectedness is what propelled the colonies into rebellion, when Massachusetts was singled out for punishment. What does Massachusetts have to do with Virginia? Or South Carolina? Nothing, on the face of it. They were separate entities. But it was the decision of the colonies to stand WITH Massachusetts and fight for her that started the chain of events leading to open revolution. Connectedness. Union. None of those things could happen on their own. Poor Richard's Almanac was one of the ties that bind. It also shows that the colonies were self-sufficient, and rarely waited for the CROWN to do things for them. Franklin is, perhaps, the best example of this. He felt there should be public libraries. So he created one. He felt there should be a fire department, along the lines of what he had seen in London. So he helped create one. He was a community-builder of the highest order, God bless him. Things must be done. He did not look to others to do them. "Oh, someone should handle that..." was not in Benjamin Franklin's emotional makeup at all. I love the guy. Of all "those guys", he is the one I would have most liked to know. I'd like to sleep with Hamilton (I mean, obvi), but I'd like to hang out with Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography:

In 1732 I first published my almanac, under the name of Richard Saunders; it was continued by me about twenty-five years and commonly called "Poor Richard's Almanac". I endeavored to make it both entertaining and useful, and it accordingly came to be in such demand that I reaped considerable profit from it, vending annually near ten thousand. And observing that it was generally read, scarce any neighborhood in the province being without it, I considered it as a proper vehicle for conveying instruction among the common people, who bought scarcely any other books. I therefore filled all the little spaces that occurred between the remarkable days in the calendar with proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry and frugality as the means of procuring wealth, and thereby securing virtue; it being more difficult for a man in want to act always honestly, as, to use here one of those proverbs, it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.
These proverbs, which contained the wisdom of many ages and nations, I assembled and formed into a connected discourse prefixed to the almanac of 1757 as the harangue of a wise old man to the people attending an auction. The bringing all these scattered counsels thus into a focus enabled them to make greater impression. The piece, being universally approved, was copied in all the newspapers of the American continent, reprinted in Britain on a large sheet of paper to be stuck up in houses; two translations were made of it in France, and great numbers bought by the clergy and gentry to distribute gratis among their poor parishioners and tenants. In Pennsylvania, as it discouraged useless expense in foreign superfluities, some thought it had its share of influence in producing that growing plenty of money which was observable for several years after its publication.

Brilliant. And therein lies his particular brand of genius. It wasn't "just" an almanac. It was written in a specific VOICE. From when he was a teenager, Benjamin Franklin loved to write under pseudonyms, but not just write - he loved to take on different characters. He would write op-ed columns, when he was just a teenager, and take on a whole different personality, writing as a long-suffering wife, for example, and these columns are so funny, so awesome - he truly INHABITS these different personalities. What a character. So he decided, "Okay, my almanack is successful. It provides the people with information they need - so let's fill it out a bit - let's put in some jokes, some quotes, some moral teachings ..." And Franklin, who couldn't be a moral bore if you PAID him, made it FUNNY. Yes, there are lessons for life, but none of them come off as preachy or didactic. You can go to church for that. He kept it funny, human, and yet ALSO educational.

Imagine if George Washington had published the almanack. Now he was an extraordinary character, but HUMOR was not one of his defining characteristics. Neither Hamilton. But Franklin, yes. He couldn't suppress his humor on the rainiest of days. It makes him stand out. Additionally, he learned, very early on, that perfection was not possible. It saves him from being holier-than-thou. For example, as a young man, he decided to try to eliminate all of his sins. He even wrote a little chart in his journal, where he could check off when he exhibited this or that moral failing. He actually made it through a perfect week, where he committed no sins, and he felt a flush of pride about this. But Franklin, a perceptive and human gentleman, realized, suddenly: But pride is a sin. Even being proud about being good qualifies as a sin. His conclusion? Moral perfection was impossible. A worthy goal perhaps, but don't kid yourself.

I love that anecdote - very very revealing, and something I think about often.

I remember my grandmother, Mummy Gina, had a huge illustrated Richard's Almanack at her house that we loved to page through as kids . I can still see some of the illustrations in my mind. I remember very well the illustration for the proverb about visitors being like fish (they start to stink after a couple of days).

I love this website. Ha!!! Especially in light of the whole key on the kite thing.

Some of the proverbs from the almanac (he freely admitted that he did not invent many of these - they were passed down, or he would put his own humorous spin on them):

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.
After three days men grow weary, of a wench, a guest, and weather rainy.

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Plough deep while sluggards sleep and you shall have corn to sell and to keep.

Have you something to do tomorrow? Do it today

There are no gains without pains.

The noblest question in the world is: What good may I do in it?

H.W. Brands writes, in his kind of lame biography of Benjamin Franklin (The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin):

Gazette readers intrigued enough to buy the bound version (priced at three shillings sixpence per dozen, obviously intended for resale) or the broadsheet edition (two shillings sixpence the dozen) were introduced to Richard Saunders, Philomath - a standard honorific for almanac-makers - by Saunders himself. "Courteous Reader, I might in this place attempt to gain thy favour by declaring that I write almanacks with no other view than the public good; but in this I should not be sincere, and men are nowadays too wise to be deceived in pretenses how specious soever." Like the printer Franklin apologizing for the advertisement that gave offense to certain customers, Saunders confessed to monetary motives. "The plain truth of the matter is, I am excessive poor, and my wife, good woman, is, I tell her, excessive proud. She cannot bear, she says, to sit spinning in her shift of tow while I do nothing but gaze at the stars, and has threatened to burn all my books and rattling-traps (as she calls my instruments) if I do not make some profitable use of them for the good of my family. The printer has offered me some considerable share of the profits, and I have thus begun to comply with my Dame's desire."

Hahahahahahaha It's a CHARACTER. It's a VOICE. Franklin would have made a great playwright.

December 18, 2009

Up in the Air: "George Clooney Saved my Novel"

I loved this piece by Walter Kirn, author of the novel Up in the Air, and his journey with that book. Fascinating. Yet another example of how you just never know what will happen in life, you have no idea what the outcome may be - but the point is to keep working. Keep "putting it out there". Luck certainly plays a part in some of this, but it's not only about luck. Fortune favors a prepared mind and all that. Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid. Etc. The book was dead in the water upon arrival, due to terrible timing (September 11th - a book where the cover depicted men in business suits plummeting through the air on fire was not going to be a crowd-pleaser at that particular time!) - and so that was that. Kirn had to move on, chalk it up to bad timing, and keep working. The story of how this forgotten novel then became a hot Hollywood property is riveting, and also goes to show you that there are good people out there, and when they believe in something, and stand by it, wonderful things can happen. (I saw the film. It's wonderful.) I especially loved this section, about the screening:

I was giddy, insanely giddy, it was true, but I had a perfect right to be just then. As my Depression-tempered grandfather used to say whenever he had the chance, “Things are tough all over, Walt.” And nowadays things are tough indeed for novelists, especially for we who won’t do vampires and don’t embed mystical codes in our plots. Yet somehow, like Ryan Bingham, I’d come through. There I was up on screen for a long few seconds, in fact: an author seated just inches from one of his characters—one that he’d both written and written off. Reitman had stuck me there to tickle my vanity, and Clooney himself had made sure I’d stay put, even after the movie was edited. “You sit close enough to me, you won’t be cut,” he’d said. And the man knows his business. Watch the movie: You’ll see.

Oh, Clooney. I love you so. One degree, man, one degree.

(I also love the bit about Kirn's girlfriend immediately turning her blackberry back on after having sex ... such a funny detail.)

I have not read the novel, but now I really want to.

Go read the whole thing. It's a great piece about process.

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"Forget about the boy"

From Thoroughly Modern Millie, performed on the 2002 Tony Awards. Exhilarating. Last Sunday, Mitchell, Rachel and I went to Side Trak, a gay bar in Chicago - and every Sunday afternoon they have a "musical comedy video" extravaganza. Hard to explain how much work goes into these compilations, that play on every screen in the joint - and the videos are different every week. Bea Arthur and Angela Lansbury performing "Bosom Buddies" (a favorite at Side Trak), various clips from Rocky Horror -but seriously, whoever puts together these videos is AMAZING. They find everything, they keep everything - and people flock to Side Trak, to have a cocktail, and sing along to EVERYTHING.

So look. Forget about the boy. That's an order!

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Communist propaganda

It's everywhere. You just have to know where to look. And you have to be insane.

For example:

STATUE OF LENIN IN THE UKRAINE

BLOWUP SANTA IN CHICAGO

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December 13, 2009

Chicago Snapshots

-- Walking into Mitchell's apartment in Chicago and seeing Rachel sitting there, with her coffee, both their laptops out - is my idea of heaven.

-- My packing strategy for this trip. "I brought pajamas and a skirt. That's about it."

-- Mitchell on Peter Allen: "He is the gayest man ... on the planet. He makes me look like Rambo."

-- There is a big Second City extravaganza going on here right now, due to it being the 50th anniversary of Second City (is that possible?) - which is why "the Rachels" are here (as we refer to them) - Hamilton and Dratch - and everyone else in the WORLD who has ever worked at Second City. I wonder who I'll run into. The thought is actually alarming. "So look out," said Rachel. "You might go into a Starbucks and see ___________ there. Actually, it's not likely that he would be at Starbucks, is it?" No. It is not. Still: a funny memory lane. All those names and people from the past.

-- Watched snippets of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert, which I had not seen.

1. Stevie Wonder doing backup singing for Sting playing "Roxanne". What?? So beautiful, so moving.

2. Stevie Wonder breaking down during singing "The Way You Make Me Feel". John Legend sitting next to him, playing along, just jamming out.

3. Metallica. Holy shit, playing BACKUP for Lou Reed? That is one of the weirdest and most beautiful things I think I have ever seen in my life. Also, it made me realize (on a visceral level) just how FAST it is that Metallica normally plays. Here, they slowed it down - playing someone else's song, and just rocking out. I love those guys so much. Also playing backup for Ozzy (Lars, yelling into the microphone at the end), "We wouldn't be here if it weren't for this man" - and Ray Davies - that one might have been my favorite "duet" of all. Hetfield saying, before introducing Davies, "He SCHOOLED us, man." There was something just so EMOTIONAL about all of this. Every single person on that stage is a world-famous musician. But there was something about the energy of these duets that made it seem like they were just kids, "jamming" in their parents' basements, playing each other's songs.

4. U2. Only saw a little bit of that one but I had a million thoughts racing through my head as I watched Bono effing OWN that stage. He's not a tall man, but dude is a rock star, and his persona is enormous. He SEEMED like he was a giant.

some thoughts watching U2:
-- Bono's voice just keeps getting better and better. He launches it up into high notes with total freedom and confidence, knowing he can "get there". No fear or pushing. It's an amazing instrument - and doesn't at all show the wear and tear of some of those harder-living rock stars who can no longer hit their old notes. Bono's voice just soars up into that exciting higher-range.
-- I wish I could describe just what it is The Edge does that gives U2 that SOUND. That unmistakable U2 sound. You could pick their songs out of a lineup every time. It's thrilling.

5. Speaking of voices sounding better, James Hetfield's voice is just getting stronger and better and more flexible. It's quite incredible. His singing backup to "You Really Got Me" showed how strong and amazing his voice is. Even more so than when he was a young man.

6. Jeff Beck coming on to play the guitar part in Stevie Wonder's "Superstitious" - INCREDIBLE!!!! Jeff Beck - my God. These two giants, supporting each other - Mitchell and I were both all choked up. Artists. Even at the high multimillion-dollar level, they're just musicians ... this is what they do. They have been highly fortunate, they are geniuses as well - but seeing all of these huge singular STARS doing backup for each other ... just so amazing. I also loved when the song ended, and everyone was applauding, and Stevie stood up to take a bow - and you could see Jeff Beck across the stage, laughing and happy, and he waved at Wonder. Uhm, Jeff, don't think the dude can see you. But it was a beautiful moment, full of heart.

-- Plans. Breakfast this morning with Mitchell and Jordan and Brian (whom I've never met but who is FAMOUS to me due to a viewing of a DVD of him in a crazy wig and sparkley lipstick lip synching BRILLIANTLY to Eartha Kitt singing a song in Japanese - one of the most amazing things I have ever seen). Then I'm going to see Mitchell's matinee - and Jimmy Sweetheart will be there!!. Dinner afterwards. Maybe cocktails with Jordan. Please? Tomorrow? Lunch with Kate, Mitchell and Julie - I know OF Julie, and I've met her (sort of) - but my main experience of her is looking up at a highwire, and seeing her in a sparkley leotard dancing across the air above my head - so it'll be fun to actually MEET meet her. At some point, dinner and drinks with Ann Marie. Then, on Wednesday, going to see Kate's show. A full schedule.

-- It's actually not that cold. It was colder on the day I left New York than it is here at this moment. I must get down to the lake - I need to say hello.

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December 11, 2009

Facets Multi-Media: A Chicago treasure

Just in time for my trip to Chicago - a really nice article about Facets, which any movie-lover in the Chicago area will know (and certainly Facets' reputation is much broader than just a local one). I've had some of my most memorable movie-watching moments in my life at Facets. I saw Husbands for the first time there, for example, but there's so much more. Mitchell and I saw The King and I there - my first time seeing it on the big screen, and his first time seeing it ever, which I did not believe was possible. I could not BELIEVE he had never seen it because he's seen everything, but glory be, he didn't even know the plot, didn't know the King died, so it was the funnest thing in the world to sit next to him and feel him DISCOVER that movie. At some point near the end of the picture, Mitchell suddenly grabbed my arm and hissed at me through the darkness ferociously, "Does the King die??? Tell me right now. Does the King die??" I refused to answer. 10 minutes later, the King died, and Mitchell's sobs echoed through the theatre. One of my favorite movie experiences ever. So many memories in that place. My friend Michael (a local Chicago boy) had the film he wrote and directed (Kwik Stop - my review here) shown at Facets (when it couldn't be seen anywhere else - God bless them for their help with distributing some of these smaller films) - and having it play at Facets had to be just the biggest thrill in the world more Michael, more meaningful than any glittery red carpet event, because it was FACETS, in his HOMETOWN. Mitchell went that night to support Michael, a really big night all around. Facets is mainstay of Chicago art-house cinema, and I always look forward to stopping by on any trip I take to the Windy City.

Go read the whole thing.

Nureyev

I finally finished Julie Kavanagh's masterpiece of a biography. It only took me almost a year. Tremendous book. Not only eloquent on all of the events and characters in Nureyev's life - but absolutely beautiful on Nureyev's PROCESS, and who he WAS as an artist and interpreter. She makes me SEE it. She is eloquent on the differences between Nureyev and "Misha" (Baryshnikov) - who defected after Nureyev did and became the "new boy in town". What was it that Nureyev had that Barishnikov did not, and vice versa? I also loved to hear that while there was obviously competition between the two (and competition is healthy - especially among athletes in a similar sport, it helps you do better, strive harder) - they were deep and close friends, bonding on their Russian-ness in the midst of a sometimes bewildering Western world. The book brought me to tears at the end, not to mention the terrifying portrait of the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic, and how frightening it was, and how nobody knew ANYTHING, although there were a few pioneers who saw what was coming (Rudolf's French doctor being one of them) and did their best to prepare. Nureyev was not ready to die. When he passed, he was still making plans. Life is precious. A precious gift. I'll be writing more about the book - just wanted to say it is an amazing accomplishment, a true "portrait of the artist".

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December 10, 2009

Satanic rituals ...

are CLEARLY going on in my neighborhood.

Compare and contrast the photos below.

SCREENGRAB FROM "ANGEL HEART"

WINDOW DOWN THE STREET FROM ME

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366

Wow! Speaking of Emily Dickinson (see below) - just came across this piece on an art exhibit based on 1862 - the year when Dickinson wrote 366 poems in 365 days. Hard to even fathom. Check it out! A spiral of colored candles. The closeup of all of the colored wax melting into each other reminds me of this spectacular scene from Tina Howe's play Painting Churches.

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The golden torso

You see weird things sometimes when you wander around the streets of Manhattan.

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Happy birthday to the Belle of Amherst

Emily Dickinson was born on this day in 1830. It is not known why she withdrew from society so completely. Theories abound. Books have been written. But the mystery remains. What we have are her poems. A wide interior life lived in one room. Extraordinary.

EMILY DICKINSON FREAKS ME OUT.

I can't settle into her poems and flip through the pages of her volumes with satisfaction and happiness and enjoyment of the verse. It's all too jagged for me. It's too raw. The long dashes in her lines, the lack of titles, the fact that she wrote all of this with the assumption that they would not be read - so there is a dashed-off immediate quality to almost all of it ... like she would be sweeping the parlor, an entire poem would pop into her brain full-blown about, oh, death, or love, or fear - and she would stop sweeping, jot it down on a scrap of paper she kept in a pocket of her dress, and then go back to sweeping. Like that's what all of her poems feel like to me, and it freaks me out. There is a great mystery surrounding Emily Dickinson (what happened to her? Why did she become a recluse?) and I, for one, hope the mystery is never solved. I enjoy reading the theories, I enjoy speculating ... but I think I like the mystery better.

She CAN'T have really existed, can she?

Here is Ted's post on Emily Dickinson. Ted and I collaborated, years ago, on a show about Joseph Cornell (my post about him here) who made some of his most famous "boxes" for Emily Dickinson (even though she was long dead). The entire cast immersed itself in Dickinson's work, looking at it in a whole new way - trying to see it through Cornell's eyes. It was a really vital and new and exciting process, and brought Emily Dickinson to life for me from the periphery. She became a Muse (Cornell was all about muses), a wise woman in a tower, throwing scraps of poems down on the populace (mainly Cornell) below. She was witty, fierce, she could be unforgiving, she withheld, nothing could convince her to unloose the bonds that tied her. She loved the bonds. Camille Paglia has always theorized that Emily Dickinson was an heir to the Marquis de Sade (gotta love Camille - or at least I do) - that her insistence on boundaries, limits, restraints - has more in common with the erotic underbelly of literature, the sado-masochism of some of history's criminals, like de Sade - than with any of Dickinson's contemporaries. In many ways, Dickinson stole from no one. She read widely, she loved poetry, but it appears that she had her own voice from the start. If you read early Sylvia Plath, you can FEEL her influences. Roethke, mainly, some of her poems steal his images wholesale, she imitates his line-length, his rhyme scheme ... This sort of "stealing" is not plagiarism, it's working out who you are as an artist and what you want to say. You read a writer and you think, "Ah. Now THAT is what I would like to do." And in the beginning stages, you may imitate too much. You have not owned it yet. Eventually, you must shake off all of your influences, and emerge on your own two feet. Dickinson sounds like no one else. But generations of writers following her imitate her. She is that distinct. She is one of the few poets where you can recognize a poem of hers just by the look of it.

Such a shy retiring lady. But with a personality as giant as a movie star's. What must she have been like in person? Underestimate her at your peril.

I went through a big Emily Dickinson phase in high school, even though she freaked me out even then. I remember being devastated once - I think I had asked a guy to the prom and he said no. I had cried for 24 hours. It was a tragedy. Friends called me up to comfort me. I wailed into the night. The next day I was exhausted from all the crying. And I wrote in my journal, "After great pain a formal feeling comes."

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Like, yeah, I think Emily Dickinson might have been talking about something a bit more wrenching than not going to the Prom - but still! I remember vividly the feeling of being washed out, and almost timid and quiet in the aftermath of all the tears - and I realized that I did feel rather "formal". She was right!

But still. It makes me laugh to think of today.

Back to Camille Paglia. Her giant book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson covers Emily Dickinson - as a matter of fact, Dickinson is the final chapter. I highly recommend that book anyway - there's a lot in it that is silly, but boy is it fun to read. I love her. Her view of Dickinson is quite individual - she sees Dickinson as an aesthete, or a decadent, at least emotionally. She didn't live it in the outer world like Oscar Wilde did, but her inner world was all decadence ... she was someone addicted to the sensations of life. You can feel it in the breathless tone of her poems. Like she is constantly pricking herself with a pin, and gasping with the pain. The pain is pleasurable almost. Pain is a doorway to pleasure. When Dickinson writes about pain, she writes about briars and thorns and cold - when she writes about love she writes about sunshine and green and warmth ... It is all in the senses. Connected by little dashes that make each poem seem breathless. She is bombarded by sensation, feeling ... it sweeps over her like a wave.

Again, she seems virtually impossible to me. I love her for it.

Michael Schmidt wrote, in his wonderful book Lives of the Poets (which I'll get to when I get to in this book excerpt thing):

She sewed her poems into little books and put them away, one after another, in a box, where after her death her sister found them, nine hundred poems "tied together with twine" in "sixty volumes." And it's not an untenable theory that the beloved whom she mourns, departed, may be Christ, the soul's lover, rather than a particular man -- or a particular woman.

Her poems vibrate with pain, feeling, thought, humor. She scares the shit out of me. The emotional life is a vast universe. You don't have to travel widely to "have a life". You don't have to have tons of experiences. You are alive. What does it feel like to be alive? That's the place Emily Dickinson writes from.

Here's a poem.

214

I taste a liquor never brewed --
From Tankards scooped in Pearl --
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of Air - am I --
And Debauchee of Dew --
Reeling -- thro endless summer days --
From inns of Molten Blue --

When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door --
When Butterflies - renounce their "drams" --
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats --
And Saints - to windows run --
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the -- Sun --

In the poem below, we could read whatever we want into it, it's not "clear" - who is "You" - it would depend on where you are at in your life, the answer. You could read it as being addressed to God. Or it could be to a great lost love, one of those experiences that mark a person forever. "Because you saturated Sight / And I had no more Eyes / For sordid excellence / As paradise". I have felt that way about a man.

640

I cannot live with You --
It would be Life --
And Life is over there --
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to --
Putting up
Our Life -- His Porcelain --
Like a Cup --

Discarded of the Housewife --
Quaint -- or Broke --
A newer Sevres pleases --
Old Ones crack --

I could not die -- with You --
For One must wait
To shut the Other's Gaze down --
You -- could not --

And I -- Could I stand by
And see You -- freeze --
Without my Right of Frost --
Death's privilege?

Nor could I rise -- with You --
Because Your Face
Would put out Jesus' --
That New Grace

Glow plain -- and foreign
On my homesick Eye --
Except that You than He
Shone close by --

They'd judge Us -- How --
For You -- served Heaven -- You know,
Or sought to--
I could not --

Because You saturated Sight --
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be --
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame --

And were You -- saved --
And I -- condemned to be
Where You were not --
That self -- were Hell to Me --

So We must meet apart --
You there -- I -- here --
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are -- and Prayer --
And that White Sustenance --
Despair --

Quotes and excerpts below about Emily Dickinson, in honor of her birthday.

"She is the spider, not the fly." -- Alison Brackenbury

"Her relationship to books , to literary preedent and example, was similar. She was no ransacker and devourer of libraries. Like Lincoln, she knew relatively few volumes but knew them deeply. As a girl she attended Amherst Academy and also Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, a few miles distant, during her seventeenth year, but school gave her neither intellectual nor social satisfactions to compensate for the reassuring intimacy of home and family she keenly missed. The standard works she knew best and drew on most commonly for allusions and references in her poetry and vivid letters were the classic myths, the Bible, and Shakespeare. Among the English Romantics, she valued John Keats especially; among her Englishc ontemporaries she was particularly attracted by the Brontes, the Brownings, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and George Eliot. None of these, however, can be said to have influenced her literary practice significantly. Indeed, not the least notable quality of her poetry is its dazzling originality. Thoreau and Emerson, especially the latter, as we know from her letters, were perhaps her most important contemporary American intellectual resources, though their liberal influence seems always to have been tempered by the legacy of a conservative Puritanism best expressed in the writings of Jonathan Edwards. Her chief prosodic and formal model was the commonly used hymnals of the times with their simple patterns of meter and rhyme." -- Norton Anthology of American Literature

"No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson ..." -- Richard Chase

"When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse -- it does not mean -- me -- but a supposed person." -- Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

"Dear friend,
I congratulate you.
Disaster endears beyond Fortune --
E. Dickinson"
-- letter written to a friend after the friend's house had burned down

"Throughout her life ED was especially sensitive to such occasions." -- Emily Dickinson's editor, commenting on a poem Dickinson wrote on the 4th anniversary of Charlotte Bronte's death

"Whitman, Dickinson and Melville seem to me the best poets of the nineteenth century here in America." -- Randall Jarrell

"The language is not literary. It enacts heard experience. Kinsmen, unexpectedly met, chatting late into the night from their different places: it brings beauty and truth into intimate focus. Strange: These are the same great terms of Keats's 'cold pastoral'." -- Michael Schmidt

"Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood." -- Richard Chase

"I never read his book - but was told that he was disgraceful." -- Emily Dickinson on Walt Whitman

"My Mother does not care for thought." -- Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

"I am growing very handsome indeed!" -- Emily Dickinson, age 14

"More than any other poet, Emily Dickinson seemed to tell me that the intense inner event, the personal and psychological, was inseparable from the universal; that there was a range for psychological poetry beyond mere self-expression." -- Adrienne Rich

"We have the legend, but the crucial facts in the recorded life are absent. Dickinson's reticence seems part of her poetical strategy: if we could assign the poems to specific emotional events, we would ground them. As it is, they are a miracle and a mystery of language." -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"

"Her wit is accuracy." -- Alison Brackenbury

"Immense in scale and oratorical in tone, this amazing short poem [Safe In Their Alabaster Chambers] departs from Dickinson's usual four-line stanza format, based on sturdy Protestant hymn measure. The first five-line stanza rolls out in a single, thrilling sentence, delivered in the magesterial public voice of a sermon or eulogy. Its as if the poem's disturbing theme - the dead and their defeated hopes - can barely be contained by traditional structure." -- Camille Paglia, "Break, Blow, Burn"

"Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive? The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask." -- Emily Dickinson to Thomas Higginson, 1862

"Emily, you wretch! No more of this nonsense! I've traveled all the way from Springfield to see you. Come down at once." -- Samuel Bowles, shouting up the stairs at Emily. Emily finally did come down.

"A step like a pattering child's in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair & a face a little like Belle Dove's; not plainer - with no good feature - in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & blue net worsted shawl. She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said 'These are my introduction' in a soft frightened breathless childlike voice -- & added under her breathe Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say -- but she talked soon & thenceforward continuously -- & deferentially -- sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead of her -- but readily recommencing...I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her." -- Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Joseph Cornell, American artist, who specialized in making boxes - built boxes for Emily Dickinson. Her ghost haunts those boxes (of course even more so when you know which ones are the "Emily boxes"). But he didn't build them as gifts FOR Emily Dickinson (who, of course, was long dead). He built them as spaces that she might inhabit. He was "preparing a place" for her. That's why so many of the Emily boxes are empty. With open windows. Which is interesting, too. He always wanted to make sure that Emily had a way to escape.

Here is the most famous box he made for Emily Dickinson. It is called "Towards the Blue Peninsula":

Haunting, isn't it?

I can feel her presence in that box. It's like she just left, via the window, but an afterimage remains. The Belle of Amherst has already flown the coop.

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December 9, 2009

Why: music video for "These Hands" and "January Twentysomething"

Directed by Ben Barnes.

Starring my awesome nephew Cashel who does an amazing job here. And my brother's girlfriend Melody is also in it, in one heart-wrenching shot.

I'm so proud.

A couple things to note:

1. Brendan was there during the shoot, and described seeing the lead actor, John Walcutt - with all of the arrows out of his back (he's obviously an incredible actor, just WATCH him) - sitting on a break with Cashel, chatting. And he's wearing the jacket with the arrows coming out of his back (a hand-made costume, unbelievable) - but by that point, it's normal that that is what he is wearing, so there he and Cashel sat, having a snack, arrows out of Walcutt's back, talking about Star Wars or whatever. I love this man.

2. I love everyone on the shoot for their kindness to Cashel.

3. The director, Ben Barnes, came to Cashel's school play a couple of weeks ago. You know, because Cashel is "his actor", they were colleagues, so to speak, so he came out to the middle school to support Cash. This speaks volumes of his good character. Here's an interview with Barnes about the video.

Enjoy. It's intense.

Cash does a great job, and it's definitely difficult to see him in this situation, but I know he had a lot of fun doing the shoot.

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Charmin: Enjoy the go!

A couple of years ago, during a day wandering through Times Square, I found I had to "go", and bad ... and suddenly I was drawn to a new "storefront", right next to the Virgin Records Store - which appeared to be a giant public bathroom, hosted by Charmin - and the whole experience was truly insane - I recounted it here. Of all of the things I have written, that piece was one of the most linked-to. It makes me glad I don't have a HUGE following because some of those people in the comments are just really mad about things, about everything - the East Coast, the liberal elite, humor that they don't understand - they are a very literal bunch, and they enjoy being mad. They didn't get the humor. One site got angry that I had used the term "wild Indians" to describe the Charmin employees who would cheer when you would exit the bathroom. They didn't like my phraseology. One conservative website referred to me as an "actor wannabe" because I had mentioned going to the Actors Equity office and the Charmin place was right around the corner. Ah yes, the kneejerk hostility to artists that I have come to know so well. "Some actor wannabe visits a place that demonstrates the downfall of Western civiliation" - or something like that. Do you feel the sneer there? Was that necessary? Do you feel how much these types of people are incapable of understanding humor? But it went across the boards, and was one of those beautiful moment when I realized that I couldn't please everyone. Literally. What one person approves of, another person deplores. All you can do is keep pleasing yourself. At least that's my view.

Many people totally GOT it, and thought it was hilarious - as I did - yet many went down the ol' boring "what is this world coming to" path, not realizing that public bathrooms in New York City are VERY important (in fact I wrote a whole post about it), and if you live here long enough, you figure out a way to navigate, clicking through your mind, "Okay, if I have to go, there's a Starbucks on 15th and 9th ..." and this monstrosity in Times Square, while completely annoying, with people dressed up as the Charmin bears, dancing around singing about how awesome it is to poop, serves a very important need - especially to the tourists, who are the main people in Times Square, especially at Christmastime. The Charmin bathroom facility - two floors in total - is an awesome addition to the urban landscape, as surreal as it is. That way, you can do your window-shopping, knowing you won't be trapped anywhere, and have to try to sneak into a local restaurant and use the facilities, or what have you. Granted, it is quite strange to have a bathroom be a sort of ROMPER ROOM environment, and I certainly don't need encouragement to do my business. I do it, and move on with my day. Visiting the Charmin Bathroom made me feel like I was suddenly in an X-rated anime video - one of those nasty-minded videos from Japan - where it's all about poop and asses, yet dressed up with pigtails and baby-talk. So strange. The strangest place I have ever been.

Now. The saga continues.

It appears that Charmin only opens that place at Christmastime, to handle the bigger crowds that flood to New York to do their shopping, etc. And yet, throughout the entire year, the place remains EMPTY. I have been so curious about their rental agreement. This is prime real estate. To hold onto it, and keep it empty, all year round - seems insane. AND, it's not like you have to pay to get in to the bathrooms. You can pee for free. This ain't Urinetown. Yes, it is one gigantic advertisement for Charmin, it is relentless - you actually feel like you have entered the compound of a CULT - there is no daylight, no clocks, and the Charmin advertising blares at you from every corner. Sensory overload. But still: what else do they get out of it? Do they pay rent the whole year?

I ask this, because, in yet another day of wandering through Times Square (not during Christmas), I was drawn to the building - which blared in a billboard: RETAIL OPPORTUNITIES - but when I peeked through the papered-over front doors, I got a glimpse of the Charmin bears dancing on the wall. So the structure inside was still intact. It's not like it was a big empty space. Charmin was still present.

I have never stopped wondering about that place, and every time I stroll by, I have to peek through the doors. Yup. Charmin bears still dancing on the walls. Weird.

Then, in November, I saw this casting call in New York (uh-oh, there's that "actor wannabe" again! I know, it's so upsetting, isn't it, when other people, total strangers, have goals and interests that you don't respect! Makes the world such a scary place!) and was SO tempted to audition just to see what it was like. Also, I learned that those cavorting people all throughout the Charmin bathroom, dancing with pom poms, and also cleaning up each stall after each person exits (seriously, this place was immaculate) were paid $10,000 for a month of work.

Anyway, I saw the casting call, and so put it in my head: Sheila, you must go back and visit that place when it re-opens, and you must go with your REAL camera. The first time I went, I was unprepared, and only had my cell phone camera ... but I have always wanted to go back there and document it correctly. (I also wanted to go back there dressed in a burqa, but that's another story entirely.)

Yesterday was the big day. I was going to a matinee of New Moon, and I actually did have business yet again at Actors Equity (oh no! Those pesky actors, doing their thing, even though I disapprove of them!), so I thought, Let's go hang out at Charmin for a bit.

It's nice having so much free time. Actually, it's not nice, but I am glad I re-visited Charmin.

It did not disappoint.

I'll walk you through it!

Here is the view of the Bathroom Facility from across Broadway and 7th.

I felt a thrill of excitement. At last!

I approached. Immediately I saw the people milled about outside in costume, just like before, cajoling and pleading for people to come in. Now that I know these people are paid $10,000 for a month's work, I don't pity them. These aren't people dressed up as hot dogs, placed on a hostile street corner, and being paid minimum wage. They will be rolling in cash after their time in Purgatory.

I asked this girl if I could take her picture. She consented with a passivity I found alarming.

I went inside. I was cheered for my decision. I didn't even have to "go", I just wanted to see the joint again. I felt a little bit bad about that, that I was operating under false pretenses. Were there cameras in the little stalls to make sure I really did "go"?

A gleaming escalator took you up to the second floor where all the bathrooms were. On the wall beside the escalator was a note of encouragement and support from Charmin:

Thank you, that's very kind, I will! I usually do!

There are video screens everywhere, showing peppy people dancing around in a big white space (with two Charmin bears as well), singing a song and doing peppy Disney-ish dances. The song goes something like this, and it is on eternal repeat:

"Charrrrrrmin!
Enjoy the go!
Charrrrrrmin!
We want to know!
Do you like number one?
Do you like number two?
Charrrrrrrrrmin!
Enjoy the go!"

I am not kidding. The videos never stop. The music is blared out into the air from well-placed speakers everywhere. Like I said, it feels like a cult. I am reminded of Jim Jones blasting his voice through the jungle compound in Guyana, exhorting his followers to stay vigilant, to be aware, that they are fully surrounded by hostile forces. If you hear that crap 24/7, you will start to believe it. You cannot escape the sensory overload. As I got on the escalator, I actually did ponder - "do I like number one? Do I like number two? What is my stance on this all-important issue? Aren't they both EQUALLY awesome?" They were getting to me already.

I actually felt excited.

At the top, you are greeted by a couple of peppy Charmin employees ("$10,000 a month, $10,000 a month" kept going through my head) who welcome you, who applaud your decision to answer nature's call, and who say, "Go down this corridor and join the line". I obeyed. The music was insistent. It makes you want to scream. There is a Blues Clues mania to the sound, a mentally ill sing-song, small children dancing with giant bears about how much they love to "go". It is a strange world. Like most people, I go to the bathroom. You know, I'm grateful for my ability in this area, and I'm happy that when I need to go, I can just, you know, go. There are others who are not so lucky. I truly am grateful, I'm not being sarcastic. Even one or two days of being constipated can make you realize: "wow, it is so awesome that I don't have to live like this every day". To those who struggle in this area, my heart goes out to you. But, you know, also like most people, I don't really CHAT about all of this in an open manner. (Except when I talk about it on my public website). It's private. At the Charmin Bathroom Facility in Times Square, it is a STRUGGLE to maintain the fact that what you are about to do in that stall is a PRIVATE matter. You really have to set your own boundaries. Don't let them bully you!!

I joined the line.

The atmosphere is insistently festive. Off to the left is a huge play-area (no other word for it), with stages, and pom poms and big couches (some of them shaped like toilets), an area where you can wait for your family members to do their business. Charmin is everywhere. You cannot escape it. It is an onslaught of the senses.

Charmin's mission statement, if you will.

The video screens with the dancing Bears applauding your poop/pee decision, whatever it may be.

In this great city of many sights, there is really only one place to hang out, and that is here.

Would you like to "rate your go"? Uhm no, I would not, because basically I think it is ALL terrific. This wall was a bit much. I felt a little bit scared when I first saw it. Like Mike Judge's Idiocracy had already come true.

And here ... at last ... the bathroom stall area.

On the floor. Again. The exhortation to "enjoy the go". It starts to feel like they are actually inside your head.

Uhm, yeah.

The "number one place to go number two" is my own apartment, thank you very much! This actually was not a bathroom stall, but some kind of employee area. I saw Charmin employees ("$10,000 a month, $10,000 a month ...") coming and going out of that door. Actually, none of these were "stalls". Everyone has their own private little room.

The music blares. Charmin employees dance around with pom poms. The line is shuffled along in an orderly manner. You do not police yourselves, Charmin takes care of that. Someone goes into the bathroom. They do their thing. They "rate their go", hopefully. Then they exit. A Charmin employee enters that particular bathroom, closes the door, and cleans up. After each person. When that task is done, they exit the bathroom, and shout something jolly like, "READY!" and then the other Charmin employee, in charge of the line of bathroom-goers, says to the next person in line, "You're up!" It is incredibly organized and it means that even though this place must service thousands of people a day, the bathrooms gleam with cleanness.

Finally, it was my turn. I was truly excited.

I went into my bathroom. Closed the door. And promptly took 3,000 photos. When I'm fascinated with something, I go all out.

So. Let's take a look. First of all, the music is even louder in the bathrooms. Each bathroom has its own iPod in a docking station, blaring music at you. If I had any performance anxiety in terms of bathroom behavior, the Charmin Bathroom would be a shrieking nightmare. Thank goodness I am the epitome of normal (at least in this area).

On the right hand wall beside the toilet is a Charmin bear, giving you a statement of emotional encouragement.

Thank you, Charmin! That's so true!

If you look up you see that the ceiling of your tiny bathroom is painted with a soothing image of blue sky with clouds. Hopefully, if you have any stress about the fact that people are out there waiting to CHEER when you exit the bathroom, just looking up at that sky should relax you, and help move things along.

On the left hand wall, next to the sink, is yet another chart telling you to "rate your go" with boneheaded choices like "Moonshiner" and "Head Over Heels". Notice the assumption that it's always good.

This goes back to the cult-like vibe of the place and its insistence on only one possible response to going to the bathroom. As I mentioned, I am grateful for my bodily functions and that they work properly. But what about people with issues? What about people with IBS? What about people with UTIs who have issues? How should THEY "rate their go"? Shouldn't you have at least ONE choice that says something along the lines of, "Well, it didn't go as well as I had hoped"? So they don't feel left out? Is Charmin not equipped (or willing) to address THOSE alternate choices in the "rate your go" posters?

Above the gleaming sink are two little cupboards (I should have looked inside) and ... what a shock ... another message from Charmin.

Beside the toilet is the iPod in its little hermetically sealed prison, and also 300 rolls of Charmin toilet paper. The rain forests are weeping.

I exited, having not "enjoyed my go", because I didn't go at all, and then meandered over into the truly frightening play area. Girls had been dancing around on the stage with pom poms doing what is, apparently, the "potty dance".

To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, "I tremble for my country when I realize that God is just."

I wandered through the area, videos blaring at me from all sides, and there is a long line of open "stalls" with various activities you can do inside. You can put down your zip code in an electronic map, so they can say, "20 people from East Chapeepee Pee-Peed here." There is also a gigantic electronic Etch a Sketch where you can "leave your mark".

Oh, and you can bet I left my mark.

By the Exit there is a giant (and I mean) giant toilet, where you can get your picture taken. Why, God, why? I ask this as a person who took 200 pictures in a 10 minute period while I was there. Human beings don't always make sense.

Back through the Praetorian Guard of peppy Charmin employees, who hoped I had had a good time ... (uhm, yes, thanks for asking ...$10,000 a month, $10,000 a month) and back down the escalator.

Of all the Charmin bears in the joint, this is the one makes me angry. I don't know why.

Back out onto the street, where our glum-faced little toilet, who, as of January 1, will be $10,000 richer, still stood, calling people in to "enjoy their go".

I hope you enjoyed this field trip that was years in the making. I know I did!

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Happy birthday, John Milton

John Milton turns 401 today. Last year, New York went all out in celebrating his birthday - with exhibits, art installations, even a costume ball. I love living here.

Milton has the kind of genius that is best not talked about too much. Just leave it be. Don't try to ask why, or HOW. Just accept that in this day and age of mortal man, giants still walk the earth on occasion. JUST ACCEPT IT. Every now and then, once every three or four centuries, a giant walks the earth. DEAL.

Milton was born on this day in 1608. He went to Oxford for a bit - but ended up leaving - and studied, basically, all of human nature and history and mankind on his own. The depth and breadth of his work, and his inquiry, is remarkable.

Jonathan Rosen, in his wonderful New Yorker article about the continuing relevance of Milton, writes:

Sometime in 1638, John Milton visited Galileo Galilei in Florence. The great astronomer was old and blind and under house arrest, confined by order of the Inquisition, which had forced him to recant his belief that the earth revolves around the sun, as formulated in his “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” Milton was thirty years old—his own blindness, his own arrest, and his own cosmological epic, “Paradise Lost,” all lay before him. But the encounter left a deep imprint on him. It crept into “Paradise Lost,” where Satan’s shield looks like the moon seen through Galileo’s telescope, and in Milton’s great defense of free speech, “Areopagitica,” Milton recalls his visit to Galileo and warns that England will buckle under inquisitorial forces if it bows to censorship, “an undeserved thraldom upon learning.”
Beyond the sheer pleasure of picturing the encounter—it’s like those comic-book specials in which Superman meets Batman—there’s something strange about imagining these two figures inhabiting the same age. Though Milton was the much younger man, in some ways his world system seems curiously older than the astronomer’s empirical universe. Milton depicted the earth hanging fixed from a golden chain, and when he contemplated the heavens he saw God enthroned and angels warring. The sense of the new and the old colliding forms part of Milton’s complex aura. The best-known portrait of his mature years makes Milton look like the dyspeptic brother of the man on the Quaker Oats box, but he is far more our contemporary than Shakespeare, who died when Milton was seven. Nobody would ever wonder whether Milton was really the author of his own work. Though “Paradise Lost” is a dilation on a moment in Genesis, it contains passages so personal that you cannot read far without knowing that the author was a blind man fallen on “evil days.” Even in his political prose, Milton will pause to tell us that he is really not all that short, despite what his enemies say. Though he coined the name “Pandemonium”—“all the demons”—for the palace that Satan and his fallen crew build in Hell, he also coined the word “self-esteem,” as contemporary a concept as there is and one that governed much of Milton’s life.

Read the whole thing: here.

I guess, on a personal note, my own terror of going blind makes me feel a strange fearful kinship with John Milton who went blind, and had to dictate his great works to others. He dictated Paradise Lost to his daughter.

What?

Honestly. I go blank when I think of this. I can't speak. To have that, that, in your head ...

There are some people who seem to be vessels of a higher being. Whatever you want to call it. You could tie them up, and throw them in a basement for 75 years, and they would STILL scratch out their epic on the basement wall. This is something that cannot be easily explained. It just is.

I'll just end with a poem that ranks among my favorites of all time. My fear of losing my sight is so deep and so profound that it is hard to even admit to, because I feel like it will come true if I speak it out loud. Milton stands before me, as a beacon - of someone this happened to - and yet he persevered. But oh. To live in darkness. To have the world of Paradise Lost in your head ... and to have to wait ... to WAIT ... as someone else takes it down in dictation ...

And so .... echoing this terrifying image of having to WAIT while your head is crammed full of Paradise Lost I'll end with Milton's sonnet to his own blindness.

Sonnet XIX: On His Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask; But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

Oh, that is bittersweet.

Here are some quotes I've compiled about (and from) Milton:

"Milton, with the possible exception of Spenser, is the first eccentric English poet, the first to make a myth out of his personal experience, and to invent a language of his own remote from the spoken word." -- W.H. Auden

Milton, even Milton, rankt with living men!
Over the highest Alps of mind he marches,
And far below him spring the baseless arches
Of Iris, colouring dimly lake and fen.
-- Walter Savage Landor

"His harmonicall and ingeniose Soul did lodge in a beautifull and well-proportioned body. He was a spare man ... He had abroun hayre. His complexion exceeding faire - he was so faire they called him the Lady of Christ's College. Ovall face. His eie a darke gray." -- John Aubrey

"Yet for two and a half centuries - even for a 'speaker' like Wordsworth - Milton's virtue was this language, which engaged and developed subjects difficult to combine, moral verities and the created world. The language of speech is not the only, or first, language of poetry. To criticize work in terms strictly irrelevant to it is of little value: a critical act of "brute assertive will", or a prejudice so ingrained as to be indistinguishable, for uncritical readers, from truth itself. With the decline of literacy, Milton, like Spenser, becomes a more difficult mountain to scale, more remote from the 'common reader'. Yet Chaucer and Shakespeare, the only poets in the tradition who are Milton's superiors, both grow and recede in the same way and are not dismissed. They seem more accessible. In the end Leavis's hostility, like Empson's and Richards's in other areas, is to the Christian content of the poems, and in Milton it is obtrusive and central. We read Herbert's and Donne's divine poems even if we are unbelievers: there is their doubt to engage, and the framed drama of specific situations. But Milton will not allow disbelief to go unchallenged: his structures and narratives are not rooted in individual faith but in universal belief. The question of revealed truth raises its head as in no other poet in the language." -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"

Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancieng English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on itself lay.
-- Wordsworth

"In Milton the world of Spenser was reconfigured and almost unrecognisable ... What had been reasonable and courteous, a belief in the fact that men of culture and intellect will be able to engage in rational discussion and agree to disagree, had been displaced by faction and sometimes violent intolerance. The moderate had stood down and the fanatic had taken his place, in the pulpit, in Parliament, and on the very peaks of Parnassus." -- TS Eliot

"I take it to be my portion in this life, joined with a strong propensity of nature, to leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die." -- John Milton

"I have bought a pocket Milton, which I carry perpetually about with me, in order to study the sentiments - the dauntless magnanimity, the intrepid, unyielding independence, the desperate daring, the noble defiance of hardship, in that great personage, SATAN." -- Robert Burns

"He was much more admired abrode than at home." -- John Aubrey

"My mind is not capable of forming a more august conception than arises from the contemplation of this greatest man in his latter days: poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted: 'Darkness before and danger's voice behind,' in an age in which he was as little understood by the party for whom, as by that against whom, he had contended, and among men before whom he strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still listening to the music of his own thoughts, or, if additionally cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three solitary individuals, he did nevertheless
... argue not
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer'd
Right onward."
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"True musical delight consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse to another." -- John Milton

"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. . . . That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. " - John Milton

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December 8, 2009

Up up and away

TLRHB has a great post about "great movie moments in flight".

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Lucy's foot

The continuing saga ...

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December 7, 2009

"Heeeeere's Sheila!"

More Photoshop hilarity from Mark (you may recall his other work). I am spending the month of January on what will be a cold wintry wind-swept island in the Atlantic. It will be bleak, isolated, and awesome. I have a lot of writing to do, and really need some time to re-coup from this dreadful year, and get some work done. I am really excited about it. Nothing more inspiring to me than the beach in the winter.

My friend Mark, on Twitter, made an "all work and no play makes Sheila a dull girl" joke which, unfortunately, I did not get immediately. He explained the reference (obviously, to Jack Nicholson trying to write his masterpiece in the middle of a blizzard in The Shining). I joked that if I am seen "galumphing around with an axe" to promptly call 911. Then I remembered that there actually is a photo of me, with appropriately crazy eyes, holding an axe in a loving murderous manner. I posted it. 10 seconds later, Mark had done some Photoshop magic. I am still laughing.

Here is the evolution of photos:

ME WITH AXE

"HEEEEEEEEEERE'S JOHNNY!"

And ... heeeeeeere's Sheila.

Mark, you rule.

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Today in history: December 7, 1941

Here is a cool fact about my home state, little Rhode Island:

There is only one newspaper in the United States that comes out on Sunday afternoon, (as opposed to Sunday morning) and that is the local paper for Westerly, (a small town in Rhode Island), called The Westerly Sun.

Because The Westerly Sun comes out at the odd time of 3 pm on Sunday - it was the only newspaper in the entire country to report the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941 - on the day it actually happened. If you look at that NY Times front page, the date, naturally, is December 8, since it didn't go to the presses until the afternoon of December 7.

The Westerly Sun is a teeny little local newspaper ... and it was the FIRST and ONLY one on that day of days.

I am picturing that tiny clapboard newspaper office in Westerly, off route 1 ... a place I have driven by many times ... a newspaper with a miniscule circulation. It is a Sunday morning and the staff of the newspaper, who normally report on school committee meetings and water board issues and the local police beat are all there, on the forefront, putting the front page together on that historic awful day. Incredible.

On December 8, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made what is now known as one of his most famous speeches (in a lifetime of famous speeches). Interesting factoid: The speech originally read "a date which will live in world history", but Roosevelt crossed that out and put in "infamy" instead. Similar to the editing out of the word "property" in the Declaration of Independence, so that the statement then became not "life, liberty and property" but "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", the crossing-out of the words "world history" and changing it to "infamy" elevated the speech from the present catastrophic moment, and catapulted up into universality, something that could live forever. It is propaganda, sure, like most great speeches are. What has been done to us yesterday will always live on "in infamy". History, and posterity, is not in question, so it doesn't even need to be mentioned: history will always see this day as "infamous". Roosevelt's notes are preserved in the National Archives:

The speech, as it was read:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to the Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. While this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Very many American lives have been lost. In addition American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island. This morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.

As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense.

Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

I believe I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces - with the unbounded determination of our people - we will gain the inevitable triumph - so help us God.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December seventh, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

30 minutes after Roosevelt finished his speech, Congress declared war on Japan.

Below the jump, a chilling telegram:

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December 6, 2009

"all fecund with its nuttiness"

An hysterical short film by Bórd Scannán na hEireann of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett playing pitch 'n putt and ... waiting ... for ... someone. Joyce is in a perpetual rage. Beckett is impenetrable. I laughed the whole way through. I love these actors. Like, Joyce: chill OUT. "all blood-red something ..." Non-stop rageful improvisation.

Thanks to Carrie for the link.

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Side Street (1950); dir. Anthony Mann

My review of Side Street is now up at the wonderful site Noir of the Week.

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December 5, 2009

Happy birthday, Joan Didion

From the essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" in the collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.
It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves "hippies". When I first went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967 I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around awhile, and made a few friends.

From essay "Notes from a Native Daughter" from Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

You might protest that no family has been in the Sacramento Valley for anything approaching "always". But it is characteristic of Californians to speak grandly of the past as if it had simultaneously begun, tabula rasa, and reached a happy ending on the day the wagons started west. Eureka - "I Have Found It" - as the state motto has it. Such a view of history casts a certain melancholia over those who participate in it; my own childhood was suffused with the conviction that we had long outlived our finest hour. In fact that is what I want to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

From Play It As It Lays:

She had watched them in supermarkets and she knew the signs. At seven o'clock on a Saturday evening they would be standing in the checkout line reading the horoscope in Harper's Bazaar and in their carts would be a single lamb chop and maybe two cans of cat food and the Sunday morning paper, the early edition with the comics wrapped outside. They would be very pretty some of the time, their skirts the right length and their sunglasses the right tint and maybe only a little vulnerable tightness around the mouth, but there they were, one lamb chop and some cat food and the morning paper. To avoid giving off the signs, Maria shopped always for a household, gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chile salsa, dried lentils and alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams, twenty-pound boxes of laundry detergent. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart. The house in Beverly Hills overflowed with sugar, corn-muffin mix, frozen roasts and Spanish onions. Maria ate cottage cheese.

From Salvador:

At the time I was in El Salvador the hostilities at hand were referred to by those reporters still in the country as "the number-four war," after Beirut, Iran-Iraq, and the aftermath of the Falklands. So many reporters had in fact abandoned the Hotel Camino Real in San Salvador (gone home for a while, or gone to the Intercontinental in Managua, or gone to whatever hotels they frequented in Guatemala and Panama and Tegucigalpa) that the dining room had discontinued its breakfast buffet, a fact often remarked upon: no breakfast buffet meant no action, little bang-bang, a period of editorial indifference in which stories were filed and held, and film rarely made the network news. "Get an NBC crew up from the Falklands, we might get the buffet back," they would say, and "It hots up a little, we could have the midnight movies." It seemed that when the networks arrived in force they brought movies down, and showed them at midnight on their video recorders, Apocalypse Now, and Woody Allen's Bananas.

From The Year of Magical Thinking:

I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John.
There was nothing I did not discuss with John.

Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other's voices.

I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were the person the other trusted. There was no separation between our investments or interests in any given situation. Many people assumed that we must be, since sometimes one and sometimes the other would get the better review, the bigger advance, in some way "competitive", that our private life must be a minefield of professional envies and resentments. This was so far from the case that the general insistence on it came to suggest certain lacunae in the popular understanding of marriage.

That had been one more thing we discussed.

What I remember about the apartment the night I came home alone from New York Hospital was its silence.

In the plastic bag I had been given at the hospital there were a pair of corduroy pants, a wool shirt, a belt, and I think nothing else. The legs of the corduroy pants had been slit open, I suppose by the paramedics. There was blood on the shirt. The belt was braided. I remember putting his cell phone in the charger on his desk. I remember putting his silver clip in the box in the bedroom in which we kept passports and birth certificates and proof of jury service. I look now at the clip and see that these were the cards he was carrying: A New York State driver's license, due for renewal on May 25, 2004; a Chase ATM card; an American Express card; a Wells Fargo MasterCard; a Metropolitan Museum card; a Writers Guild of America West card (it was the season before Academy voting, when you could use a WGAW card to see movies free, he must have gone to a movie, I did not remember); a Medicare card; a Metro card; and a card issued by Medtronic with the legend "I have a Kappa 900 SR pacemaker implanted," the serial number of the device, a number to call for the doctor who implanted it, and the notation "Implant Date: 03 Jun 2003". I remember combining the cash that had been in his pocket with the cash in my own bag, smoothing the bills, taking special care to interleaf twenties with twenties, tens with tens, fives and ones with fives and ones. I remember thinking as I did this that he would see that I was handling things.

From Where I Was From:

Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another. The separation, of north from south - and even more acutely of west from east, of the urban coast from the agricultural valleys and of both the coast and the valleys from the mountain and desert regions to their east, was profound, fueled by the rancor of water wars and by less tangible but even more rancorous differences in attitude and culture. My mother made the trip from Sacramento to Los Angeles in 1932, to see the Olympics, and did not find reason to make it again for thirty years. In the north we had San Francisco, with its Beaux Arts buildings and eucalyptus, its yearning backward and westward, its resolutely anecdotal "color"; a place as remote and mannered as the melancholy colonial capitals of Latin America, and as isolated. When I was at Berkeley and had gone home to Sacramento for a weekend I would sometimes take the Southern Pacific's transcontinental City of San Francisco back down, not the most convenient train (for one thing it was always late) but one that suggested, carrying as it did the glamour of having come across the mountains from the rest of America, that our isolation might not be an indefinite sentence.

From Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11:

Seven days after September 11, 2001, I left New York to do two weeks of book promotion, under other circumstances a predictable kind of trip. You fly into one city or another, you do half an hour on local NPR, you do a few minutes on drive-time radio, you do an "event", a talk or a reading or an onstage discussion. You sign books, you take questions from the audience. You go back to the hotel, order a club sandwich from room service, and leave a 5 AM call with the desk, so that in the morning you can go back to the airport and fly to the next city. During the week between September 11 and the Wednesday morning when I went to Kennedy to get on the plane, none of these commonplace aspects of publishing a book seemed promising or even appropriate things to be doing. But - like most of us who were in New York that week - I was in a kind of protective coma, sleepwalking through a schedule made when planning had still seemed possible. In fact I was protecting myself so successfully that I had no idea how raw we all were until that first night, in San Francisco, when I was handed a book onstage and asked to read a few marked lines from an essay about New York I had written in 1967.
Later I remembered thinking: 1967, no problem, no land mines there.

I put on my glasses. I began to read.

"New York was no mere city," the marked lines began. "It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself."

I hit the word "perishable" and I could not say it.

I found myself onstage at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco unable to finish reading the passage, unable to speak at all for what must have been thirty seconds.

From Miami:

In this mood Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accommodated. The most ordinary morning, say at the courthouse, could open onto the distinctly lurid. "I don't think he came out with me, after all," i recall hearing someone say one day in an elevator at the Miami federal courthouse. His voice had kept rising. "What happened to all that stuff about how next time he gets twenty keys, he could run wherever-it-is-Idaho, now he says he wouldn't know what to do with five keys, what is this shit?" His companion had shrugged. Outside one courtroom that day a group of Colombians, the women in silk shirts and Chanel necklaces and Charles Jourdan suede pumps, the children in appliequed dresses from Baby Dior, had been waiting for the decision in a pretrial detention hearing, one in which the government was contending that the two defendants, who between them lived in houses in which eighty-three kilos of cocaine and a million-three in cash had been found, failed to qualify as good bail risks.
"That doesn't make him a longtime drug dealer," one of the two defense lawyers, both of whom were Anglo and one of whom drove a Mercedes 380 SEL with the license plate DEFENSE, had argued about the million-three in cash. "That could be one transaction." Across the hall that day closing arguments were being heard in a boat case, a "boat case" being one in which a merchant or fishing vessel has been boarded and drugs seized and eight or ten Colombian crew members arrested, the kind of case in which pleas were typically entered so that one of the Colombians would get eighteen months and the others deported. There were never any women in Chanel necklaces around a boat case, and the lawyers (who were usually hired and paid for not by the defendants but by the unnamed owner of the "load", or shipment) tended to be Cuban. "You had the great argument, you got to give me some good ideas," one of the eight Cuban defense lawyers on this case joked with the prosecutor during a recess. "But you haven't heard my argument yet," another of the defense lawyers said. "The stuff about communism. Fabulous closing argument."

From the essay "John Wayne: A Love Song", included in Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened Quonset hut which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of 1943, while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, "at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow". As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.
I tell you this neither in a spirit of self-revelation nor as an exercise in total recall, but simply to demonstrate that when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams. It did not seem possible that such a man could fall ill, could carry within him that most inexplicable and ungovernable of diseases. The rumor struck some obscure anxiety, threw our very childhoods into question. In John Wayne's world, John Wayne was supposed to give the orders. "Let's ride," he said, and "Saddle up." "Forward ho," and "A man's gotta do what he's got to do." "Hello there," he said when he first saw the girl, in a construction camp or on a train or just standing around the front porch waiting for somebody to ride up through the tall grass. When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something going wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.

From Political Fictions:

The genuflection toward "fairness" is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what "fairness" has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.

From the essay "Girl of the Golden West" from After Henry:

Yet if the Hearsts were no longer a particularly arresting California family, they remained embedded in the symbolic content of the place, and for a Hearst to be kidnapped from Berkeley, the very citadel of Phoebe Hearst's aspiration, was California as opera. "My thoughts at this time were focused on the single issue of survival," the heiress to Wyntoon and San Simeon told us about the fifty-seven days she spent in the closet. "Concerns over love and marriage, family life, friends, human relationships, my whole previous life, had really become, in SLA terms, bourgeois luxuries."
This abrupt sloughing of the past has, to the California ear, a distant echo, and the echo is of emigrant diaries. "Don't let this letter dishearten anybody, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can," one of the surviving children of the Donner Party concluded her account of that crossing. "Don't worry about it," the author of Every Secret Thing reported having told herself in the closet after her first sexual encounter with a member of the SLA. "Don't examine your feelings. Never examine your feelings - they're no help at all." At the time Patricia Campbell Hearst was on trial in San Francisco, a number of psychiatrists were brought in to try to plumb what seemed to some an unsoundable depth in the narrative, that moment at which the victim binds over her fate to her captors. "She experienced what I call the death anxiety and the breaking point," Robert Jay Lifton, who was one of those psychiatrists, said. "Her external points of reference for maintenance of her personality had disappeared," Louis Jolyon West, another of the psychiatrists, said. Those were two ways of looking at it, and another was that Patricia Campbell Hearst had cut her losses and headed west, as her great-grandfather had before her.

From the essay "LA Noir from After Henry:

There was always in the Cotton Club case a certain dreamland aspect, a looniness that derived in part from the ardent if misplaced faith of everyone involved, from the belief in windfalls, in sudden changes of fortune (five movies and four books would change someone's fortune, a piece of The Cotton Club someone else's, a high-visibility case the district attorney's); in killings, both literal and figurative. In fact this kind of faith is not unusual in Los Angeles. In a city not only largely conceived as a series of real estate promotions but largely supported by a series of confidence games, a city even then afloat on motion pictures and junk bonds and the B-2 Stealth bomber, the conviction that something can be made of nothing may be one of the few narratives in which everyone participates. A belief in extreme possibilities colors daily life. Anyone might have woken up one morning and been discovered at Schwab's, or killed at Bob's Big Boy. "Luck is all around you," a silky voice says on the California State Lottery's Lotto commercials, against a background track of "Dream a Little Dream of Me". "Imagine winning millions ... what would you do?"

From the essay "The White Album" from The White Album:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Or at least we do for a while.

Happy birthday to one of my favorite writers of all time.

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Things to write about:

-- Hope's various favorite spots in my apartment and WHEN she chooses to go to each place - it's very specific
-- Allison leaving New York and how hard it was to say goodbye
-- the strange repetitive event in my life of men saying my name - both first and last - in a sighing appreciative contemplative way - this has happened with 100% of the men I am either interested in or were involved with, and I find it curious
-- my plans for 2010. It's gonna be a doozy. Former Communist countries are involved. As well as run-down motels.
-- another post on Tom Noonan's What Happened Was...
-- my final thoughts on Alice and the Fawn - and how I had the whole thing wrong from the start (here, and here)
-- my experience in what I now believe is a cult
-- a big post on Gena Rowlands. It's about time. I told Jeremiah it would be like "opening a vein", but seriously, stop avoiding the issue Sheila.
-- my Man in the Mirror post that has been in the works for, what, 4 years?
-- a post about what happened to me in June of this year. I think the smoke is finally clearing which means I will be able to write about it.
-- more in-depth posts on movies. Movies I want to cover: Living Out Loud, Punch-Drunk Love, Mulholland Drive, Magnolia - long-time major favorites that I sort of have avoided.
-- a post about the nice emails I have received from perfect strangers over the years. that one's been in the works for some time.
-- a big post on Julia Roberts. Again, it's about time. Stop avoiding the issue, Sheila. Make a stand.

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December 4, 2009

"There's no signal up here...."

Halloween the movie would never work today, because the screaming babysitter could just call 911 from her cell phone while barricaded in the closet. Any movie involving nubile teens camping in the woods as a serial psychotic murderer stalks them now needs to deal with the fact that said teens today would be Tweeting the entire experience, or at least texting friends to come help them. Nobody is alone anymore. The cell-phone-problem (as it were) MUST be handled by horror and suspense films now, it can't be ignored - otherwise current-day audiences just won't believe that these people are 1. stranded 2. there's no way out 3. there is no one who can save them.

Check out this very funny and pointed compilation of scenes below - of various people trying to find signals, unable to find signals, commenting on their cell phone coverage in the middle of a horror film, lamenting that there are "no bars", or - even more desperately - dropping their cell phones in puddles, or of scaffolding ... ANYTHING to make sure that these people do not have cell phones.

Funny stuff. Kudos to Rich Juzwiak who put this together - it's quite impressive. (Thanks to Edmund, for the clip).

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Today in history: December 4, 1783

George Washington met with his officers in Fraunces Tavern here in New York City to resign his commission as Commander in Chief. It was an emotional moment. The war had been long. What would happen now? Fraunces Tavern was downtown (still is - amazing, right?) and Washington met with his officers and then walked outside to the nearby waterfront, and got on a barge that took him across the Hudson River, back to civilian life.

So let's back into this.

On November 2, 1783, Washington made a farewell address to the armies of the United States. Washington, a very formal patrician man, had deep wells of emotion in him (that much of his meticulous manners had been devised to hide): titanic rage, deep feeling, and while often in his correspondence he comes across as robotic, and so formal that it's hard to figure out what the damn dude is even SAYING - when the emotion gets too strong for him to hide (and it is usually rage that is the emotion), it sparks off the page at you. You can almost hear his living voice. His years-long haranguing of Congress and how badly they were managing the war is so frustrating to read now. You can feel his helplessness as he looks around at his nearly-naked starving troops, and you realize that Washington was not a man to be trifled with. You know, basically that he was 6 foot 8, weighs a fucking ton... And when he filled up with emotion it is so startling, the contrast with his regular formality. Someone like John Adams was a big ball of emotion at all times (for good or ill), and so his correspondence reads very differently than Washington's. Adams is funny, sensitive, cranky, touchy, observant - they feel like letters you could receive today. But Washington's are from another era entirely. It is hard to get a sense of the man, at times. In order to get a sense of him, you have to look at his actions - because the written word was not his forte. His Farewell Address, worked over and edited, is beautifully done, high-flung, inspirational. One can only imagine the response of the army who had stuck with him through years of war. Some excerpts from that address:

It is universally acknowledged, that the enlarged prospects of happiness, opened by the confirmation of our independence and sovereignty, almost exceeds the power of description. And shall not the brave men, who have contributed so essentially to these inestimable acquisitions, retiring victorious from the field of War to the field of agriculture, participate in all the blessings which have been obtained; in such a republic, who will exclude them from the rights of Citizens and the fruits of their labour. In such a Country, so happily circumstanced, the pursuits of Commerce and the cultivation of the soil will unfold to industry, the certain road to competence. To those hardy Soldiers, who are actuated by the spirit of Adventure the Fisheries will afford ample and profitable employment, and the extensive and fertile regions of the West will yield a most happy asylum to those, who, fond of domestic enjoyments are seeking for personal independence. Nor is it possible to conceive, that any one of the U States will prefer a national bankruptcy and a dissolution of the union, to a compliance with the requisitions of Congress and the payment of its just debts; so that the Officers and Soldiers may expect considerable assistance in recommencing their civil occupations from the sums due to them from the public, which must and will most inevitably be paid.

Ha. Shades of his anger at Congress there. You WILL pay the debt, Congress, you WILL. I DECLARE IT.

But here, in the closing of his Farewell Address, he takes it upon himself, as a father would almost, to coach the soldiers in how to re-enter normal civilian life. He is basically saying, "you can do this. You must do this." He knows it will not be easy. He himself would find it a struggle, although he loved domestic life, and it was a great sacrifice to him to be away from home for years. Here he says:

The Commander in chief conceives little is now wanting to enable the Soldiers to change the military character into that of the Citizen, but that steady and decent tenor of behaviour which has generally distinguished, not only the Army under his immediate command, but the different detachments and separate Armies through the course of the war. From their good sense and prudence he anticipates the happiest consequences; and while he congratulates them on the glorious occasion, which renders their services in the field no longer necessary, he wishes to express the strong obligation he feels himself under for the assistance he has received from every Class, and in every instance. He presents his thanks in the most serious and affectionate manner to the General Officers, as well for their counsel on many interesting occasions, as for their Order in promoting the success of the plans he had adopted. To the Commandments of Regiments and Corps, and to the other Officers for their great zeal and attention, in carrying his orders promptly into execution. To the Staff, for their alacrity and exactness in performing the Duties of their several Departments. And to the Non Commissioned Officers and private Soldiers, for their extraordinary patience in suffering, as well as their invincible fortitude in Action. To the various branches of the Army the General takes this last and solemn opportunity of professing his inviolable attachment and friendship. He wishes more than bare professions were in his power, that he were really able to be useful to them all in future life. He flatters himself however, they will do him the justice to believe, that whatever could with propriety be attempted by him has been done, and being now to conclude these his last public Orders, to take his ultimate leave in a short time of the military character, and to bid a final adieu to the Armies he has so long had the honor to Command, he can only again offer in their behalf his recommendations to their grateful country, and his prayers to the God of Armies. May ample justice be done them here, and may the choicest of heaven's favours, both here and hereafter, attend those who, under the devine auspices, have secured innumerable blessings for others; with these wishes, and this benediction, the Commander in Chief is about to retire from Service. The Curtain of separation will soon be drawn, and the military scene to him will be closed for ever.

Not a dry eye in the house.

On November 25, 1783, George Washington and his troops "took back" New York City in an emotional parade. New York had been under British control for the entirety of the war. A couple of weeks, later, on this day in history, Washington stepped down.

The more formal resignation would come on December 23, 1783, with a big speech he made to Congress in Annapolis - but first, he gathered with almost 50 officers at Fraunces Tavern for a good-bye. It was written up in the paper:

Last Thursday noon, the principal Officers of the army in town, assembled at Fraunces Tavern, to take a final leave of their illustrious, gracious, and much loved Commander, General Washington. The passions of human nature were never more tenderly agitated, than in this interesting and distressful scene…[His] words produced extreme sensibility on both sides… -- Rivington's New-York Gazette, and Universal Advertiser, December 6, 1783.

"interesting and distressful scene". I can only imagine.

On December 4, 1783, he gathered at Fraunces Tavern with his officers and they caroused, and made toasts, and it sounds from all the accounts like it was almost an encounter-group session a la the 1970s. Grown men blubbering into their handkerchiefs, embracing one another, expressing lifelong friendship - and basically living in that intense state where everything being felt is beyond words.

Washington raised a glass and said to the men (texts of all of his speeches gotten from George Washington : Writings (Library of America):

With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable…I…shall feel obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand.

General Henry Knox was standing right next to Washington, and upon those words, the two men turned to one another. What do you say?? Colonel Benjamin Talmadge wrote in his memoir that the two men were "suffused in tears" and "embraced each other in silence." Washington then moved on to the next officer, and the next - repeating this emotional goodbye with each one. Everyone's hearts must have been exploding. Nobody spoke. Washington's brief words at the beginning were the only words spoken. When he had embraced the last officer, he left the Tavern, with the entire group following him in silence. He passed through the corps of light infantry and made his way to the Whitehall Ferry Landing where a barge was waiting. He got on, with the crowd gathered on the landing, and as the boat sailed away, he waved.

A couple of weeks later, there was a formal dinner and dance in Annapolis, where Washington formally handed back his commission as Commander in Chief (it had been granted in 1775). He made yet another emotional speech, and then walked out. His horse was waiting by the door.

The famous story goes that King George in England, humiliated and baffled by this strange turn of events, asked Benjamin West (an American painter, living in England) what Washington would do now that it all was over. West said, "They say he will go back to live on his farm." King George thought about this, and replied, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."

Joseph Ellis, touching on this important point, writes in his book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation:

...it is crucial to recognize that Washington's extraordinary reputation rested less on his prudent exercise of power than on his dramatic flair at surrendering it. He was, in fact, a veritable virtuoso of exits. Almost everyone regarded his retirement of 1796 as a repeat performance of his resignation as commander of the Continental Army in 1783. Back then, faced with a restive and unpaid remnant of the victorious army quartered in Newburgh, New York, he had suddenly appeared at a meeting of officers who were contemplating insurrection; the murky plot involved marching on the Congress and then seizing a tract of land for themselves in the West, all presumably with Washington as their leader. He summarily rejected their offer to become the American Caesar and denounced the entire scheme as treason to the cause for which they had fought. Then, in a melodramatic gesture that immediately became famous, he pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket: "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles," he declared rhetorically, "for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country."... On December 22, 1783, Washington surrendered his commission to the Congress, then meeting in Annapolis: "Having now finished the work assigned me," he announced, "I now retire from the great theater of action." In so doing, he became the supreme example of the leader who could be trusted with power because he was so ready to give it up.

Extraordinary. So rare as to be almost unheard of.

Jefferson, who was in Annapolis, with Congress, stage-managed the entire dinner/dance/speech. (What a shock. He of the "who me? I just want to hang out on my farm and watch my flowers grow, I'm no politician" was, in fact, the most wily politician of them all!) The relationship between Washington and Congress was not friendly, to say the least, and Jefferson, with his inimitable sense of "the moment", the zeitgeist, and what was NEEDED (he really has no equal in this, whatever his other faults may be), knew that this thing required planning, exquisite and detailed management, so that it could come off as it needed to come off. Washington had requested Jefferson to do this for him. As Joseph Ellis commented, Washington was a "virtuoso of exits".

Willard Sterne Randall writes in George Washington: A Life:

At Annapolis, Jefferson, the most distinguished member of Congress was working secretly behind the scenes, stage-managing the important final tribute Washington was about to pay to a civilian government and, equally important, seeing to it that Congress responded with suitable dignity. Whether Congress won back any of the respect it had squandered during the Revolution depended on the perception, both in American and Europe, of Washington's grand public gesture of transforming his real power into the symbolism neceessary for a democratic government.

These men knew the eyes of the world were watching. These men knew that while there were a couple of nations out there who wanted this experiment to succeed, there were many more who hoped for failure. Symbolism, gesture, ritual, theatrics - all of this played a crucial part in the Revolution from start to finish. Awareness of posterity. Awareness of finding the RIGHT gesture. The RIGHT words. (Benjamin Franklin's precise editing of Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence is one of the greatest examples of that. Jefferson's draft was spectacular as it was, but Franklin's suggestions made it infinitely more powerful and universal. A gesture not just for their time and their circumstance, but one that could serve future generations in similar situations.)

Washington, after leaving New York on December 4, headed to Annapolis in a caravan with escorts. With each town he passed through, crowds of people gathered to greet him, cheer him, throw flowers at him. Martha was accompanying him. Leading citizens of the various towns, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, gave him dinners and parties to celebrate him. To add to the impending drama, Congress was, as of yet, unaware that he was coming to resign his commission. They knew he approached, but that bit of information had been kept secret (although many suspected). Again, Washington (and his advisers) had a fine-tuned sense of the MOMENT. Jefferson met the Washingtons on the outskirts of town. The people of Annapolis had arranged a 13-gun salute in his honor, there were parties and celebrations, and in the midst of all of this, Jefferson and Washington were strategizing, meeting, huddling up. They had many worries about the ineptitude of the Continental Congress. Let's not forget that early in 1783, Congress had been forced to evacuate Philadelphia when threatened by troops who had marched on them demanding their pay. Congress was on the run, forced to take temporary seats in various cities, Princeton, etc. You know, this shite looks BAD. Washington's officers were enraged at the situation and had pressed Washington to seize power, become a dictator, essentially. Something needed to be done. Part of Washington's essential messages of farewell to his troops and the officers was about resisting the urge to KEEP power. Yes, there is chaos in any democracy, yes, it is a chaotic time, but retreat to your domestic life, and let it go. Let it go. He certainly wasn't about to "let go" the fact that Congress owed him money, but the alternative for him WASN'T storming Annapolis, with his army in tow, taking power by force. Nope. Not his thing. That is why King George felt that if Washington really meant what he said that he would be the greatest man who had ever lived.

Jefferson had arranged for Washington to head to the State House and hand in his resignation personally to the president of Congress. Interestingly enough, the President of Congress was Thomas Mifflin - who had fought beside Washington in the Bunker Hill days, and was now kind of in the enemy camp. Washington found this very disorienting. He had been in charge of Mifflin, once upon a time, and now Mifflin was President of the very body he held in such suspicion. He did not trust Mifflin, and certainly did not like being put in the position of having to ask Mifflin for instructions on what he should do next. Go to Congress personally? Write a letter to them? What?

His letter to Thomas Mifflin reads:

I take the earliest opportunity to inform Congress of my arrival in this city with the intention of asking leave to resign the commission I have the honor of holding in their service. It is essential for me to know their pleasure, and in what manner it will be most proper to offer my resignation, whether in writing or at an audience; I shall therefore request to be honored with the necessary information, that being apprized of the sentiments of Congress I may regulate my Conduct accordingly. I have the honor etc.

A real example of how everyone was just making this thing up as they went along. Also a real example of Washington's desire to have correct Conduct, which went back to his earliest days as a young boy, when he would copy out rules from various etiquette books into his diary.

Thomas Mifflin took the letter, read it out in Congress (without Washington present) and then, naturally, committees were formed to figure out the protocol. How does one resign the commission? What is appropriate? As always, these men knew that their choices would be watched by future generations (not to mention their present-day allies and enemies), and perhaps copied and imitated. The pressure!

Mifflin hosted a private dinner for Washington that week. Then came Congress' turn to pay homage. A delegate from Delaware, James Tilton, left his memories of that night.

Between the two and three hundred gentlemen dined together in the ballroom. The number of cheerful voices with the clangor of knives and forks made a din of a very extraordinary nature and most delightful influence. Every man seemed to be in heaven or so absorbed in the pleasures of imagination as to neglect the more sordid appetites, for not a soul got drunk.

On December 22, there was a ball at the State House.

Willard Sterne Randall describes the evening:

With Martha on his arm, Washington crossed the marble-floored portico, quickly bisecting the cheering citizenry, taking refuge in a wide arcaded hallway and seeing the shimmering Corinthian columns supporting the high central dome for the first time. The entire vaulted chamber was packed tonight with a jostling of invited guests. While Jefferson was too ill to be there, the fete was a tribute to his genius for behind-the-scenes organization, and Washington made the most of it. Tilton reported to Bedford, "To light the rooms every window was illuminated." The number of guests swelled to nearly six hundred, a "brilliant" assemblage, he added. George Washington, a famous dancer, astonished French officers with his skill and grace at the minute. "The General danced every set," Tilton recounted, "that all the ladies might have the pleasure of dancing with him or, as it has since been handsomely expressed, get a touch of him."

Ha! Celebrity culture lives in all eras.

December 23rd, the next day, was the big day, where Washington would appear before Congress and give a finely-crafted speech, the work of jefferson and Washington together. Nothing would be left to chance. Again, Martha accompanied her husband.

Willard Sterne Randall again:

On Tuesday, December 23, at the prescribed noon hour, Washington's carriage rolled up the long hill above Annapolis Harbor and swung around to the portico of the State House amid the roar of a throng of well-wishers. With Martha at his side and two aides close behind, he stepped up to the heavy doors and halted. At a tap from an aide, the doors to the bright green Senate Chamber swung open. Charles Thomas, secretary of every Continental Congress since the first, led Washington and his aides to the front of the chamber past the twenty congressmen, all sitting with their tricornered hats on. Washington, his own hat in hand, sat down facing up to the speaker's platform where President Mifflin stood to welcome him. At a nod from Mifflin, the chamber's doors opened again and a surge of two hundred women spectators, led by Martha Washington, climbed the narrow stairs and found seats in the balustraded visitors' gallery. On the main floor, behind a low screen and on every window seat two hundred men who had fought under Washington and a few who had fought against him jostled for a place. Mifflin pounded his gavel for quiet. There was a moment when the only sound in the crowded room was the crackling of logs burning in the ornately fluted fireplace.
The hushed assemblage included Maryland's four signers of the Declaration of Independent, two future presidents, four Revolutionary generals, and several future cabinet members. Then President Mifflin gave the nod for Washington to speak. He rose and faced Congress, remaining in front of his assigned chair: he made no move toward the podium. Following Jefferson's lead, the delegates raised their hats, then lowered them, keeping them on. His hand visibly trembling, Washington drew a paper from his breast pocket and began to speak with great emotion.

Washington's address to Congress as that day is as follows:

Mr. President: The great events on which my resignation depended having at length taken place; I now have the honor of offering my sincere Congratulations to Congress and of presenting myself before them to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the Service of my Country.
Happy in the confirmation of our Independence and Sovereignty, and pleased with the opportunity afforded the United States of becoming a respectable Nation, I resign with satisfaction the Appointment I accepted with diffidence. A diffidence in my abilities to accomplish so arduous a task, which however was superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our Cause, the support of the Supreme Power of the Union, and the patronage of Heaven.

The Successful termination of the War has verified the most sanguine expectations, and my gratitude for the interposition of Providence, and the assistance I have received from my Countrymen, encreases with every review of the momentous Contest.

While I repeat my obligations to the Army in general, I should do injustice to my own feelings not to acknowledge in this place the peculiar Services and distinguished merits of the Gentlemen who have been attached to my person during the War. It was impossible the choice of confidential Officers to compose my family should have been more fortunate. Permit me Sir, to recommend in particular those, who have continued in Service to the present moment, as worthy of the favorable notice and patronage of Congress.

I consider it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my Official life, by commending the Interests of our dearest Country to the protection of Almighty God, and those who have the superintendence of them, to his holy keeping.

Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of Action; and bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.

Knowing what was in store for him, the words "That's what YOU think, George!" come to mind. You THINK you're going to retire from public life, but just you wait!

But we cannot know the future. This was a very very important exit. It had to be done. Not just for his own happiness (he missed his farm), but for the good of the brand new nation. War was over. Time to figure out how to get along in peace.

He got roped back in to public life (you know, with that minor event called "Becoming the First President of the United States"), but his genius was in relinquishing power at the exact moment when it seemed only natural that he should KEEP the power.

To quote Dad, "We were very very lucky."

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"All I got to do was hurry on my tiptoes (not even on pointe!) across the stage and look pleased that I got some bullshit nutcracker for Christmas."

Cara, with a beautiful post entitled "Being Clara".

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The Aughts

My friend Dan has a really great piece up about culture in the aughts. His perspective.

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December 3, 2009

Today in history: December 3, 1947

A Streetcar Named Desire opened in New York at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

Scene 5, Streetcar Named Desire

BLANCHE: Young man! Young, young, young man! Has anyone ever told you that you look like a young Prince out of the Arabian Nights?

Tennessee Williams lived in New Orleans while finishing Streetcar which, at that time, was called The Poker Night. Here is Kenneth Holditch, who gives literary tours in New Orleans:

[Williams] said from that apartment he could hear that rattletrap streetcar named Desire running along Royal and one named Cemeteries running along Canal. And it seemed to him the ideal metaphor for the human condition.

Tennessee Williams on Irene Selznick, who was chosen to produce Streetcar:

She is supposed to have 16 million dollars and good taste. I am dubious.

Irene Selznick, Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, consulting backstage at Streetcar

Elia Kazan on scripts:

"One must do one's best and at a certain point say, 'I've done all I can. I'm not going to make this better.'
I've noticed that the best pieces of writing for the theatre I've known are complete at birth. The first draft had it -- or didn't. In both Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman, I asked the author for no rewriting, and rehearsals didn't reveal the need for any. Those plays were born sound. The work, the struggle, the self-flaggelation -- had all taken place within the author before he touched the typewriter. usually when there is a lot of tampering and fussing over a manuscript, there's something basically wrong to begin with."

Tennessee Williams, letter to Jay Laughlin, April 9, 1947:

I have done a lot of work, finished two long plays. One of them, laid in New Orleans, A STREETCAR CALLED DESIRE, turned out quite well. It is a strong play, closer to "Battle of Angels" than any of my other work, but is not what critics call "pleasant". In fact it is pretty unpleasant.

Some background. In 1947 (when Streetcar was still in the planning stages), Williams saw Arthur Miller's All My Sons on Broadway and was blown away. Kazan had directed. Williams immediately reached out to Kazan, striking up a correspondence (obviously having Kazan in mind to direct his new "unpleasant" play STREETCAR CALLED DESIRE). Kazan had reservations at first. Williams' stuff perhaps seemed too fragile, ephemeral, effeminate, I'm sure. He wasn't sure how he would handle it as a play. Kazan responded to Miller's social and political commentary (as a red-dyed Lefty from way back), and Williams' work is strictly apolitical. Kazan said, "Miller seemed more my kind." Kazan recognized Williams' talent but just wasn't sure if it was his cup of tea as a director. How little we know ourselves at times! Anyway, Williams' agent Audrey Wood opened up negotiations with Kazan, also looping in Irene Selznick. At some point, early on, the negotiations broke down and Kazan withdrew his interest, causing everyone to go into a tailspin. Eventually, they came to an agreement, and Kazan signed back on - but before that, Williams wrote Kazan (or "Gadge" as he was known to his friends, short for "Gadget") a letter. I love these early letters because their relationship has not solidified yet. Theirs ended up being a spectacular collaboration, one of the most important in American theatrical history, but they didn't know that in 1947.

Tennessee Williams to Elia Kazan, April 19, 1947.

I am bitterly disappointed that you and Mrs. Selznick did not come to an agreement. I am wondering what was the primary trouble - the script itself or your unwillingness to tie up with another producer. Frankly I did not know that you were now in the producing field. Working outside of New York has many advantages but a disadvantage is that you lack information about such things. I have known you only in the capacity of actor and director.
I am sure that you must also have had reservations about the script. I will try to clarify my intentions in this play. I think its best quality is its authenticity or its fidelity to life. There are no "good" or "bad" people. Some are a little better or a little worse but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts. Stanley sees Blanche not as a desperate, driven creature backed into a last corner to make a last desperate stand - but as a calculating bitch with "round heels". Mitch accepts first her own false projection of herself as a refined young virgin, saving herself for the one eventual mate - then jumps way over to Stanley's conception of her. Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego. That is the way we all see each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition - all such distortions within our own egos - condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions in our own egos, the corresponding distortions in the egos of the others - and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each others naked hearts. Such a case seems purely theoretical to me.

However in creative fiction and drama, if the aim is fidelity, people are shown as we never see them in life but as they are. Quite impartially, without any ego-flaws in the eye of the beholder. We see from outside what could not be seen within, an the truth of the tragic dilemma becomes apparent. It was not that one person was bad or good, one right or wrong, but that all judged falsely concerning each other, what seemed black to one and white to the other is actually grey - a perception that could occur only through the detached eye of art. (As if a ghost sat over the affairs of men and made a true record of them) Naturally a play of this kind does not exactly present a theme or score a point, unless it be the point or theme of human misunderstanding. When you begin to arrange the action of a play to score a certain point the fidelity to life may suffer. I don't say it always does. Things may be selected to score a point clearly without any contrivance toward that end, but I am afraid it happens rarely.

Finding a director aside from yourself who can bring this play to life exactly as if it were happening in life is going to be a problem. But that is the kind of direction it has to have. (I don't necessarily mean "realism": sometimes a living quality is caught better by expressionism than what is supposed to be realistic treatment.)

I remember you asked me what should an audience feel for Blanche. Certainly pity. It is a tragedy with the classic aim of producing a katharsis of pity and terror, and in order to do that Blanche must finally have the understanding and compassion of the audience. This without creating a black-dyed villain in Stanley. It is a thing (misunderstanding) not a person (Stanley) that destroys her in the end. In the end you should feel - "If only they all had known about each other!" - But there was always the paper lantern or the naked bulb!

(Incidentally, at the close of the play, I think Stanley should remove the paper lantern from the bulb - after Blanche is carried out and as he goes to resume the game.)

I have written all this out in case you were primarily troubled over my intention in the play. Please don't regard this as "pressure". A wire from Irene and a letter from Audrey indicate that both of them feel you have definitely withdrawn yourself from association with us and that we must find someone else. I don't want to accept this necessity without exploring the nature and degree of the difference between us.

Scene 3, Streetcar Named Desire:

STANLEY: Stella! My baby doll's left me! [He breaks into sobs. Then he goes to the phone and dials, still shuddering with sobs] Eunice? I want my baby! [He waits a moment; then he hangs up and dials again] Eunice! I'll keep on ringin' until I talk with my baby! [An indistinguishable shrill voice is heard. He hurls phone to floor. Dissonant brass and piano sounds as the rooms dim out to darkness and the outer walls appear in the night light. The "blue piano" plays for a brief interval. Finally, Stanley stumbles half-dressed out to the porch and down the wooden steps to the pavement below the building. There he throws back his head like a baying hound and bellows his wife's name: Stella! Stella, sweetheart! Stella!"] Stell-lahhhhh!
EUNICE: [calling down from the door of her upper apartment] Quit that howling out there an' go back to bed!

STANLEY! I want my baby down here. Stella, Stella!

EUNICE: She ain't comin' down so you quit! Or you'll git th' law on you!

STANLEY: Stella!

EUNICE: You can't beat on a woman an' then call 'er back! She won't come! And her goin' t' have a baby!... You stinker! You whelp of a Polack, you! I hope they do haul you in and turn the fire hose on you, same as the last time!

STANLEY: [humbly] Eunice, I want my girl to come down with me!

EUNICE: Hah! [She slams her door]

STANLEY: [with heaven-splitting violence] STELL-LAHHHHH!

[The low-tone clarinet moans. The door upstairs opens again. Stella slips down the rickety stairs in her robe. Her eyes are glistening with tears and her hair loose about her throat and shoulders. They stare at each other. Then they come together with low, animal moans. He falls to his knees on the steps and presses his face to her belly, curving a little with maternity. Her eyes go blind with tenderness as she catches his head and raises him level with her. He snatches the screen door open and lifts her off her feet and bears her into the dark flat.]

After Kazan withdrew, Irene Selznick, Audrey Wood and Williams exchanged letters considering different directors - Josh Logan, John Huston, Tyrone Guthrie (Williams dismissed the idea immediately: "he is English. This is an American play.") - none of them felt as right as Kazan, although Logan was the closest. Anyway, it all ended up being a moot point, because negotiations reopened with Kazan. He was concerned about having Selznick mess up his process, not used to working with her as a producer - as a matter of fact, he originally said he would only direct Streetcar if Selznick were fired. Back, forth, back forth - Kazan negotiated for artistic control (he had mentioned some elements in the script he wanted to have re-worked), also billing - all the usual contract stuff. Kazan was on board. Williams was ecstatic. Wrote to Gadge again.

Tennessee Williams to Elia Kazan, May 1, 1947:

Irene says you think the play needs considerable re-writing. As you never said this, or intimated it, in our talk or your letter, I don't take this seriously, but I think it is only fair to tell you that I don't expect to do any more important work on the script. I spent a long time on it and the present script is a distillation of many earlier trials. It certainly isn't as good as it could be but it's as good as I am now able to make it. - I have never been at all difficult about cuts and incidental line-changes but I'm not going to do anything to alter the basic structure - with one exception. For the last scene, where Blanche is forcibly removed from the stage - I have an alternative ending, physically quieter, which could be substituted if the present ending proves too difficult to stage. That's about all the important change I could promise any director, and only that if the director finds the other unworkable.

If you are content with this understanding about the script - then I can just say - "Irene, I want Gadge and won't take anyone else." AUDREY and Bill would back me up and I think I could run interference for you all the way down the field.

Scene 1, Streetcar Named Desire:

BLANCHE: How did he take it when you said I was coming?
STELLA: Oh, Stanley doesn't know yet.

BLANCHE: You - haven't told him?

STELLA: He's on the road a good deal.

BLANCHE: OH. Travels?

STELLA: Yes.

BLANCHE. Good. I mean - isn't it?

STELLA: I can hardly stand it when he is away for a night...

BLANCHE: Why, Stella!

STELLA: When he's away for a week I nearly go wild!

BLANCHE: Gracious!

STELLA: And when he comes back I cry on his lap like a baby...

BLANCHE: I guess that is what is meant by being in love.

By May 1947, Kazan's contract was set. Williams, after a couple of months of crazy negotiations, went to Cape Cod for some "tranquility". He wrote to Kazan again from there.

Letter of Tennessee Williams to Elia Kazan, May 1947:

Needless to say, I am eager for your ideas. I think this play has some excellent playing scenes but there are also some weak passages and some corny touches. I am determined to weed these out as much as possible before we go into rehearsal. You and I may not agree about exactly which and where these are but I am sure a lot of good will come out of consultation between us. The cloudy dreamer type which I must admit to being needs the complementary eye of the more objective and dynamic worker. I believe you are also a dreamer. There are dreamy touches in your direction which are vastly provocative, but you have a dynamism that my work needs to be translated into exciting theater. I don't think "Pulling the punches" will benefit this show. It should be controlled but violent. I went to see "All My Sons" again. I was more impressed than ever, the way lightning was infused into all the relationships, everything charged with feeling, nothing, even the trivial exchanges, allowed to sag into passivity. Yes, I think you can try new things in my play. In that sense it might be good for you, and it will certainly be good for me. It is a working script. I think we can learn and grow with it and possibly we can make something beautiful and alive whether everyone understands it or not. People are willing to live and die without understanding exactly what life is about but they must sometimes know exactly what a play is about. I hope we can show them what it is about but since I cannot say exactly what it is about, this is just a hope. But maybe if we succeed in our first objective of making it alive on the stage, the meaning will be apparent.
On second visit to "Sons", I decided that [Karl] Malden was right for Mitch. I hope you agree. The face is comical but the man has a dignified simplicity and he is a great actor. I also met Burt Lancaster. Was favorably impressed. He has more force and quickness than I expected from the rather plegmatic type he portrayed in The Killers. He also seemed like a man who would work well under good direction.

As that last paragraph indicates, both Williams and Kazan were turning their minds to casting. Williams discussed the casting of Blanche with Audrey Wood.

Tennessee Williams to Audrey Wood, mid-June 1947:

I would not recommend investment in this show to any friend until that part [Blanche] has been satisfactorily cast. By satisfactorily I mean with a really powerful dramatic actress in the part. [Margaret] Sullavan is strictly compromise on that score. She is the sort of actress that would get "excellent personal notices" but do the play no good: unless she has more on the ball than we derived from her readings. Right now [Jessica] Tandy is the only one who looks good to me and I am waiting till I see her and hear her. Could you leave a piece ($5000.) open until Blanche is cast? Then I'll know whether or not Mother ought to invest.
Another question: will Tandy be in New York this summer? Could she come East for inspection here? If she was the Blanche we dream of, then I could dispense with the Coast trip which I dread making, as I would probably have to travel alone, and when I got there, would probably be subjected to intense pressure for script changes: the best I can do for this production is to stay in good shape for rehearsals. There isn't much in the script that should be altered until we know the exact limitations of the Blanche selected and hear the lines spoken. I will do a lot of cutting then. The rewrite on Scene V does not read as well as original but I think it will play better and is more sympathetic for Blanche. (Makes Mitch more important to her).

Jo Mielziner signed on to design Streetcar.

Tennessee Williams to Margo Jones, early-July 1947:

Jo's designs for Streetcar are almost the best I've ever seen. The back wall of the interior is translucent with a stylized panorama showing through it of the railroad yards and the city (when lighted behind). It will add immensely to the poetic quality.

Both Kazan and Williams had John Garfield in mind for the part of Stanley Kowalski. Kazan and Garfield went way back to the 30s, in the days of the Group Theatre, and Garfield was now out in Hollywood, becoming a movie star. He balked at the idea of coming back for an open-ended run which would keep him out of Los Angeles indefinitely. So although the trade papers announced that Garfield had signed on to play Stanley (this in early August), that was not actually the case. Garfield only wanted to do it for four months, a limited run, and he also wanted to be guaranteed the role in the film, should it be made into a film. Irene Selznick turned Garfield down, and so they had to, again, look for another Stanley.

Tennessee Williams to Audrey Wood, August 25, 1947 in the middle of the Garfield brou-haha:

A good many things have happened to upset and disturb me in connection with the management of "Streetcar" and I am sure you would want me to tell you frankly about them. In the first place, the new last scene of the play, the crucial scene upon which the success or failure of the play may very well depend, has either been lost or deliberately withheld for it is not in the new scripts ... I worked on various versions of this scene the whole time I was on the Coast and in Dallas and on the train coming to New York. I delivered it to a typist at the Selznick office together with the other (less important) revisions with the clearly stated and unmistakable direction that all of these revisions were to be incorporated in a new script. I did this so that Gadge would have the new script, and particularly the new last scene, to read and consider when he went into his Connecticut retreat. It now turns out that Gadge has never seen my revision of the last scene. He told me this on the phone. Weeks are passing at a period when every day counts, without any exchange of view on this all-important last scene. A mystery is made about it. Nobody even seems to know where my original copy of it is? Now this is the sort of high-handed, officious and arbitrary treatment that seems to characterize the Selznick company. My work is too important to me, in fact it has always been an is now even more so - for me to accept this sort of treatment from a company that has only produced one failure which closed out of town. I suppose this sounds as if I were gnashing my teeth with rage. I admit that is true. I am. I am willing to accept the bungling of the Garfield deal and the nerve-wracking battle that was waged to secure the right director, but when arbitrary action is taken interfering with my irreductible rights as an author, I'm not going to take it. This is not a sudden display of peevishness on my part. I entered the agreement with Selznick because we were led to believe that we would have what we wanted in every respect and that there were great advantages to be derived from her management in casting due to her Hollywood connections. These advantages have not materialized. In fact the casting alone has been just about the biggest headache I've had in my theatrical experience - outside of Boston. I am not alone in this opinion, as you must know if you have talked to Kazan. It was bad management that announced Garfield in the papers before he was signed and I strongly suspect that good management would have signed him. The play has already been damaged and compromised before it has even gone into rehearsals. .. I am not going to lose this play because of poor management and I am going to see that it is protected in every possible and reasonable way because that is what I have a right to expect as the one who has given most and who has the most at stake. A play is my life's blood...
The actor George Beban was flown out here from the Coast and read for me this morning. This actor has had summer stock experience and has chased a stage coach in a Grade B Western. It was his first time on a horse. He is more adventuresome than I. I don't want to put my play under him. He gave a fair reading. He is of medium height with a rather tough and virile quality but he was monotonous, there was no gradation to his reading, no apparent humor or dexterity which comes from experience and from natural acting ability. He read one scene on his feet and his body movements were stiff and self-conscious with none of the animal grace and virility (When I say grace I mean a virile grace) which the part calls for and it made me more bitterly conscious than ever of how good Garfield would have been. I think it was a brutal experience for this actor, and I do regard actors as human beings some of them just as sensitive and capable of disappointment and suffering as I am. I don't understand why he was put through this ordeal with no more apparent attributes than he showed this morning. Of course it was a great strategic error, if the Selznick office hoped to interest me in this actor, to accompany him with the new scripts, for when I saw that my final scene had been left out I was somewhat distracted from anything else. I am sure, however, that I gave the actor a pretty fair appraisal, notwithstanding this factor. None of us, Gadge, Irene or I, were at all impressed by the screen-tests we saw of him on the Coast.

That leaves us with Marlon Brando, of the ones that have been mentioned to date. I am very anxious to see and hear him as soon as I can. He is going to read for Gadge and if Gadge likes him I would like to have a look at him.

A couple of days after Tennessee wrote this letter, Elia Kazan took Marlon Brando up to Provincetown to meet the playwright, and to read for the role of Stanley. Brando was only 23 years old, so Williams had originally rejected even the idea of seeing him for the role at all, since in his mind Stanley was around 30. He was too young. Brando had had a couple of New York hits, had gotten some notice already - but he wasn't a star yet. He also was a terrible "auditioner", as many great actors are. People who were pushing Brando for the part were naturally concerned that if all they did was have Brando read from the script, he wouldn't show up well at all. Kazan understood about the difference between audition and performance - that someone can be incredible onstage and be awful at auditions. He had seen Brando onstage and knew he had the "magnetism" that could work very well for Stanley. He sent Brando the script. Brando read it and was very impressed but also scared out of his mind.

Brando to reporter Bob Thomas:

I finally decided that it was a size too large for me, and called Gadg to tell him so. The line was busy. Had I spoken to him at that moment, I'm certain I wouldn't have played the role. I decided to let it rest for a while, and the next day Gadg called me and said, 'Well, what is it - yes or no?' I gulped and said, 'Yes.'

Kazan then took Brando up to Provincetown to meet Tennessee Williams. It's rather a notorious meeting, told by all the different parties who were there - Brando, Williams, etc. Williams was sitting in his beach house, with Pancho, the crazy hot-tempered lover, and a couple of his friends from Texas (Margo Jones, and others). Everyone was drunk. The electricity and the plumbing was not operational - it had gone out a couple days before - so they sat there in the gathering dark, whooping it up. This was when Brando arrived from New York. Brando strolled in, assessed the situation, walked into the bathroom, stuck his hand down the toilet to unclog it - and then fiddled with the blown fuses to get the electricity back on. Imagine a young Brando doing this. Brando was no idiot. I'm sure he himself was aware that "reading from the script" as an audition was not his strongest point, and perhaps doing a little plumbing and electrical work as the playwright looked on would help his case. Or who knows, maybe it was completely unconscious and he thought, "What the hell? No lights? No toilet? I can fix that!" Whatever his motivations, when he finished with the blown fuses, he stood in the middle of the living room and started his audition. He only got 30 seconds into it before Williams stopped him. Williams told him he had the part, and then promptly gave him bus fare to go right back to New York to sign the contract. 30 seconds in the beach house living room, reading Stanley - and Williams knew. He's my Stanley. Not a moment to lose. Here's money, go back to New York right now, sign the contract.

Irene Selznick remembers her first meeting with this new young actor, as he signed a two-year contract in her office:

He didn't behave like someone to whom something wonderful had just happened, nor did he try to make an impression; he was too busy assessing me. Whatever he expected, I wasn't it. He seemed wary and at a loss how to classify me. He was wayward one moment, playful the next, volunteering that he had been expelled from school, then grinning provocatively at me. I didn't take the bait. It was easy going after that. He sat up in his chair and turned forthright, earnest, even polite.

Scene 2, Streetcar Named Desire:

STANLEY: Have you ever heard of the Napoleonic code?
STELLA: No, Stanley, I haven't heard of the Napoleonic code and if I have, I don't see what it -

STANLEY: Let me enlighten you on a point or two, baby.

STELLA: Yes?

STANLEY: In the state of Louisiana we have the Napoleonic code according to which what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband and vice versa. For instance if I had a piece of property, or you had a piece of property-

STELLA: My head is swimming!

STANLEY: All right. I'll wait till she gets through soaking in a hot tub and then I'll inquire if she is acquainted with the Napoleonic code. It looks to me like you've been swindled, baby, and when you're swindled under the Napoleonic code I'm swindled too. And I don't like to be swindled.

STELLA: There's plenty of time to ask her questions later but if you do now she'll go to pieces again. I don't understand what happened to Belle Reve but you don't know how ridiculous you are being when you suggest that my sister or I or anyone of our family could have perpetrated a swindle on anyone else.

STANLEY: Then where's the money if the place was sold?

STELLA: Not sold - lost, lost!

Tennessee Williams to Audrey Wood, August 29, 1947:

I can't tell you what a relief it is that we have found such a God-sent Stanley in the person of Brando. It had not occurred to me before what an excellent value would come through casting a very young actor in this part. It humanizes the character of Stanley in that it becomes the brutality or callousness of youth rather than a vicious older man. I don't want to focus guilt or blame particularly on any one character but to have it a tragedy of misunderstandings and insensitivity to others. A new value came out of Brando's reading which was by far the best reading I have ever heard. He seemed to have already created a dimensional character, of the sort that the war has produced among young veterans. This is a value beyond any that Garfield could have contributed, and in addition to his gifts as an actor he has great physical appeal and sensuality, at least as much as Burt Lancaster. When Brando is signed I think we will have a really remarkable 4-star cast, as exciting as any that could possibly be assembled and worth all the trouble that we have gone through. Having him instead of a Hollywood star will create a highly favorable impression as it will remove the Hollywood stigma that seemed to be attached to the production. Please use all your influence to oppose any move on the part of Irene's office to reconsider or delay signing the boy, in case she doesn't take to him.

Brando was signed. Kim Hunter was signed. Malden and Tandy were signed. Now the rest of the cast needed to be filled out.

Tennessee Williams to Irene Selznick, Sept. 8, 1947:

I would like to have a hand in the selection of Eunice. But I am sure that you all can weed out the field and let me look over the final contestants. As for the poker players: I am sure Gadge will do a good job on them. There is the Mexican and Steve Hubbs in addition to Mitch and Stanley. Steve should be a big beefy guy. The Mexican is called a "Greaseball". Might be cast accordingly. I would say all men around Stanley's age, or a bit older. Eunice is a coarse and healthy character. The nurse is a bit sinister: a large and masculine type. I don't know whether or not you want to use the Mexican woman selling the tin flowers. Check with Gadge on that. If not her speeches can be easily deleted from the script.
As for the last scene, I will give it another work-out. I feel that my last revision on it is the best to date. It has not as much "plus-quality" in the writing as I would like. However I think it will play well. Where it lacks most is the dialogue between Stella and Eunice: there is still something too cut-and-dried in the necessary exposition between them. I will try (but can't promise) to improve on that. It may soften too much. We mustn't lose the effect of terror: everybody agrees about that.

Scene 11, Streetcar Named Desire:

STELLA: Everything packed?
BLANCHE: My silver toilet articles are still out.

STELLA: Ah!

EUNICE: [returning] They're waiting in front of the house.

BLANCHE: They! Who's "they"?

EUNICE: There's a lady with him.

BLANCHE: I cannot imagine who this "lady" could be! How is she dressed?

EUNICE: Just - just a sort of a - plain-tailored outfit.

BLANCHE: Possibly she's- [Her voice dies out nervously]

STELLA: Shall we go, Blanche?

BLANCHE: Must we go through that room?

STELLA: I will go with you.

BLANCHE: How do I look?

STELLA: Lovely.

EUNICE: Lovely.

[Blanche moves fearfully to the portieres. Eunice draws them open for her. Blanche goes into the kitchen.]

BLANCHE: [to the men] Please don't get up. I'm only passing through.

[She crosses quickly to outside door. Stella and Eunice follow. The poker players stand awkwardly at the table - all except Mitch, who remains seated, looking down at the table. Blanche steps out on a small porch at the side of the door. She stops short and catches her breath.]

DOCTOR: How do you do?

BLANCHE: You are not the gentleman I was expecting.

In October, 1947. Tennessee Williams wrote a letter to "Pancho", his lover and companion.

We start rehearsals Monday. Gadge is full of vitality and optimism. Miss Tandy has arrived in town looking very pretty with her new blond hair and all the script changes have been approved and finally typed up.

Rehearsals for Streetcar began in October.

Here is Elia Kazan, a cunning canny man, who worked with every actor differently, pulling each one aside, whispering, cajoling, manipulating. But here he is in working with Brando:

With other actors, I'd always say what just what I want: 'You do this. No, I don't like that, I want you to do it like this.' With Marlon ... it was more like, 'Listen to this and let's see what you do with it.' ... I'd heard about his parents, but not from him, and I never asked. I treated him with great delicacy. One reason he got to trust me - as a director - was that I respected his privacy... I was always hoping for a miracle with him, and I often got it.

Blanche Dubois, scene 1, Streetcar Named Desire:

Now, then, let me look at you. But don't you look at me, Stella, no, no, no, not till later, not till I've bathed and rested! And turn that over-light off! Turn that off! I won't be looked at in this merciless glare! Come back here now! Oh, my baby! Stella! Stella for Star! I thought you would never come back to this horrible place! What am I saying? I didn't mean to say that. I meant to be nice about it and say - Oh, what a convenient location and such - Ha-a-ha! Precious lamb! You haven't said a word to me!

Tennessee Williams to friend Margo Jones, October, 1947, after rehearsals had begun:

I cannot find words to tell you how wonderful Jessica [Tandy] and Gadge are, and what a superb combination their talents appear to be. I have never seen two people, except maybe you, work as hard on anything. Or have as much respect for each other, which is so important. Gadge's method is to stage one new scene a day and to go over all the preceding scenes in sequence. Tomorrow, Monday, he will stage the final, eleventh scene, which I think is the crucial one. We have not come into conflict on any point. Occasionally I have to suggest a little less realistic treatment of things, to which he always accedes. His great gift is infusing everything with vitality. Sometimes in his desire to do this he neglects to dwell sufficiently upon a lyric moment. However this is not through failure to comprehend them, and he is always eager for my advice. Everybody is working out fine with the possible exception of Kim Hunter. She was very bad at first, is now improving but will, I am afraid, always be the lame duck in the line-up. She too is working like a fire-horse but is not a very gifted actress and shows up badly in contrast to one as emotionally and technically rich as Jessica.

Williams wrote in his memoirs:

Kazan was one of those rare directors who wanted the playwright around at all rehearsals... Once in a while he would call me up on stage to demonstrate how I felt a certain bit should be played. I suspect he did this only to flatter me for he never had the least uncertainty in his work.

Kazan describes how he would pull Marlon aside and start to give him direction, and in the middle of him speaking, Brando would turn and walk away. Not in a dismissive manner, but because Brando needed very little explanation. If you talked too much, it would leave him. Kazan would suggest - Brando would pick up on the subterranean message - walk off and think about it and then try it.

Kazan on Brando:

Look, Marlon was always at arm's length and he felt safe there, uninspected, unprobed. How much of the potential penetration was based on my insight, as opposed to stuff I picked up here and there, I don't know... It's my trade, though. I know where to look, where to put my hand in, what to try to pull out, what to get.

Brando's feeling that the play was a size too big for him was intensified by the knowledge that John Garfield had been the first choice. He couldn't get that out of his head, the anxiety that he was second-banana. He would mutter, "They should have gotten John Garfield" in the middle of rehearsals when he was struggling. His insights into the character of Stanley, however, are invaluable. He really SAW Stanley and in my opinion he shows the lie behind that whole "you have to like the character you are playing" malarkey that so many actors subscribe to. (However, Brando was a genius. So we have to factor that in. He is an unusual case). But he didn't like Stanley. Not one bit. Marlon was strong, athletic, but not an aggressive brute like Stanley. Here he is on Stanley Kowalski:

A man without any sensitivity, without any kind of morality except his own mewling, whimpering insistence on his own way ... one of those guys who work hard and have lots of flesh with nothing supple about them. They never open their fists, really. They grip a cup like an animal would wrap a paw around it. They're so muscle-bound they can hardly talk.

That is incredibly insightful analysis.

A well-known fact now, after one week of rehearsal, Brando moved into the theatre, sleeping on a cot backstage. He immersed himself entirely in the role. This was not out of bravado, but out of insecurity. He honestly didn't feel he could do it. The only way for him to at least attempt to succeed was to never ever leave the part. He stopped eating, sleeping. He was late to rehearsals. Kazan, rather than being impatient for results, was tender. Gentle with Marlon. The other actors were at another level, almost performance-level, as Marlon was still mumbling and wandering around. This was not affectation. This was true struggle. Marlon Brando is so imitated now that it is hard to remember just what a revolutionary moment this performance was. It didn't come out of nowhere. Brando had great talent, yes, but part of that talent was knowing how his own talent operated, and that meant mumbling, not committing - not yet - holding back, wandering around, and trying to feel his way in. It was very frustrating for the other actors, who were more straight-line Broadway professionals.

Karl Malden describes a moment in rehearsal:

We were rehearsing the bathroom scene, the one where I come out and meet Blanche for the first time and Stanley says, 'Hey, Mitch, come on!' Now, as we were working on it, every day would be different. Marlon would come in before you said your line, or way after you said your line, or even before you had anything to say. The best was all wrong.
Anyway, it was just beginning to go well for me for the first time - when you think, Oh, my God, this is it - and boom, he hit me with one that just upset everything. I said, 'Oh, shit!' and threw something and walked offstage, up into the attic. Kazan said, 'What the hell happened?'

'I can't concentrate,' I told him. 'I was going along beautifully and all of a sudden in comes this jarring thing. It throws me. It's impossible.' I was furious and explained that it had been happening regularly. He said, 'Wait'.

Kazan made a little speech the next day for the cast, saying:

Let's talk this out right now. Karl, you have to get used to the way Marlon works. But Marlon, you must remember that there are other people in the cast also.

Scene 6, Streetcar:

MITCH: I told my mother how nice you were, and I liked you.
BLANCHE: Were you sincere about that?

MITCH: You know I was.

BLANCHE: Why did your mother want to know my age?

MITCH: Mother is sick.

BLANCHE: I'm sorry to hear it. Badly?

MITCH: She won't live long. Maybe just a few months.

BLANCHE: Oh.

MITCH: She worries because I'm not settled.

BLANCHE: Oh.

MITCH: She wants me to be settled down before she- [His voice is hoarse and he clears his throat twice, shuffling nervously around with his hands in his pockets.]

BLANCHE: You love her very much, don't you?

MITCH: Yes.

BLANCHE: I think you have a great capacity for devotion. You will be lonely when she passes on, won't you? [Mitch clears his throat and nods] I understand what that is.

MITCH: To be lonely?

BLANCHE: I loved someone, too, and the person I loved lost.

MITCH: Dead? [She crosses to the window and sits on the sill, looking out. She pours herself another drink.] A man?

BLANCHE: He was a boy, just a boy, when I was a very young girl ...

Tandy was especially thrown off by Brando. Brando lived backstage, with a set of weights and his bongo drums, his clothes were filthy and ripped, she just did not understand this way of working. But they all soldiered on.

By mid-October, the cast was ready for a run-through. Stella Adler was in attendance, as well as Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy's husband. After a couple of weeks of trying to "find" the part, Marlon suddenly gave a full-blown white-hot opening-night performance - which startled and electrified everyone present. Nobody forgot that day when they realized they were looking at a young man who was going to be a giant giant star. It made Hume Cronyn nervous. Streetcar was about Blanche, not Stanley. If Stanley is so superb, so watchable, that Blanche seems incidental to HIS journey - then isn't that counter to what the play actually is. Cronyn actually spoke to Kazan about it. It wasn't that Brando was bad, or that Tandy was bad - it was that the CONTRAST in acting styles and intensity made Tandy look weaker as an actress, despite her already-long illustrious career.

Later, Kazan said:

Perhaps Hume meant that by contrast with Marlon, whose every word seemed not something memorized but the spontaneous expression of an intense inner experience - which is the level of work all actors try to reach - Jessie was what? Expert? Professional? Was that enough for this play? Not for Hume. Hers seemed to be a performance; Marlon was living on stage. Jessie had every moment worked out carefully, with sensitivity and intelligence, and it was all coming together, just as Williams and I had expected and wanted. Marlon, working 'from the inside', rode his emotion wherever it took him; his performance was full of surprises and exceeded what Williams and I had expected. A performance miracle was in the making.

Streetcar opened in Boston for a tryout run and played from November 3 to November 15, 1947. There was already bubbling issues with censorship - especially in regards to the rape scene, which was causing controversy already.

During rehearsals, Kazan (in particular) was concerned that Brando's performance would be so strong and vital that it would tip the balance of the play. More on this later, in a great quote from Kazan. Anyway, the reviews they got in Boston were fair - with Tandy getting most of the press, people raving about her performance. The earthquake that was Marlon Brando wasn't quite making itself felt yet. Tandy was the big star. Brando was 23 years old. Phenomenal. But so far, the play was in balance.

Streetcar then moved to Philadelphia for another tryout (November 17-29) before coming to New York for its premiere. The buzz was starting. People were starting to notice. The play was sold out, and the reviews were superb. Not just of the acting, but of the play itself. There seemed a consciousness that something big was about to happen.

And then finally, New York. Streetcar Named Desire opened on this day, in 1947.

Tennessee Williams, letter to Jay Laughlin, December 4, 1947:

Streetcar opened last night to tumultuous approval. Never witnessed such an exciting evening. So much better than New Haven you wdn't believe it; N.H. was just a reading of the play. Much more warmth, range, intelligence, interpretation, etc. - a lot of it because of better details in direction, timing. Packed house, of the usual first-night decorations, - Cecil B'ton, Valentina, D. Parker, the Selznicks, the others and so on, - and with a slow warm-up for first act, and comments like "Well, of course, it isn't a play," the second act (it's in 3 now) sent the audience zowing to mad heights, and the final one left them - and me - wilted, gasping, weak, befoozled, drained (see reviews for more words) and then an uproar of applause which went on and on. Almost no one rose from a seat till many curtains went up on whole cast, the 4 principles, then Tandy, who was greeted by a great howl of "BRavo!" from truly all over the house. Then repeat of the whole curtain schedule to Tandy again and finally ........... 10 Wms crept on stage, after calls of Author! and took bows with Tandy. All was great, great, GREAT!

Elia Kazan in his memoir on Stanley/Brando and how it tipped the balance of the play - a very revealing anecdote:

But what had been intimated in our final rehearsals in New York was happening. The audiences adored Brando. When he derided Blanche, they responded with approving laughter. Was the play becoming the Marlon Brando Show? I didn't bring up the problem, because I didn't know the solution. I especially didn't want the actors to know that I was concerned. What could I say to Brando? Be less good? Or to Jessie? Get better? ...
Louis B. Mayer sought me out to congratulate me and assure me that we'd all make a fortune ... He urged me to make the author do one critically important bit of rewriting to make sure that once that "awful woman" who'd come to break up that "fine young couple's happy home" was packed off to an institution, the audience would believe that the young couple would live happily ever after. It never occurred to him that Tennessee's primary sympathy was with Blanche, nor did I enlighten him ... His misguided reaction added to my concern. I had to ask myself: Was I satisfied to have the performance belong to Marlon Brando? Was that what I'd intended? What did I intend? I looked to the author. He seemed satisfied. Only I -- and perhaps Hume [Cronyn, Tandy's husband] -- knew that something was going wrong ...

What astonished me was that the author wasn't concerned about the audience's favoring Marlon. That puzzled me because Tennessee was my final authority, the person I had to please. I still hadn't brought up the problem, I was waiting for him to do it. I got my answer ... because of something that happened in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, across the hall from my suite, where Tennessee and Pancho [Tennessee's companion at the time] were staying. One night I heard a fearsome commotion from across the hall, curses in Spanish, threats to kill, the sound of breaking china ... and a crash ... As I rushed out into the corridor, Tennessee burst through his door, looking terrified, and dashed into my room. Pancho followed, but when I blocked my door, he turned to the elevator still cursing, and was gone. Tennessee slept on the twin bed in my room that night. The next morning, Pancho had not returned.

I noticed that Wiilliams wasn't angry at Pancho, not even disapproving -- in fact, when he spoke about the incident, he admired Pancho for his outburst. At breakfast, I brought up my worry about Jessie and Marlon. "She'll get better," Tennessee said, and then we had our only discussion about the direction of his play. "Blanche is not an angel without a flaw," he said, "and Stanley's not evil. I know you're used to clearly stated themes, but this play should not be loaded one way or the other. Don't try to simplify things." Then he added, "I was making fun of Pancho, and he blew up." He laughed. I remembered the letter he'd written me before we started rehearsals, remembered how, in that letter, he'd cautioned me against tipping the moral scales against Stanley, that in the interests of fidelity I must not present Stanley as a "black-dyed villain". "What should I do?" I asked. "Nothing," he said. "Don't take sides or try to present a moral. When you begin to arrange the action to make a thematic point, the fidelity to life will suffer. Go on working as you are. Marlon is a genius, but she's a worker and she will get better. And better."

Marlon Brando on doing Streetcar and becoming famous:

You can't always be a failure. Not and survive. Van Gogh! There's an example of what can happen when a person never receives any recognition. You stop relating: it puts you outside. But I guess success does that, too. You know, it took me a long time before I was aware that that's what I was - a big success. I was so absorbed in myself, my own problems, I never looked around, took account. I used to walk in New York, miles and miles, walk in the streets late at night, and never see anything. I was never sure about acting, whether that was what I really wanted to do; I'm still not. Then, when I was in "Streetcar", and it had been running a couple of months, one night -- dimly, dimly -- I began to hear this roar.

Scene 10, Streetcar:

STANLEY: Oh! So you want some roughhouse! All right, let's have some roughhouse! [He springs toward her, overturning the table. She cries out and strikes at him with the bottle top but he catches her wrist] Tiger - tiger! Drop the bottle-top! Drop it! We've had this date with each other from the beginning!

NY Times review:

December 4, 1947, NY Times
FIRST NIGHT AT THE THEATRE by Brooks Atkinson

Tennessee Williams has brought us a superb drama, "A Streetcar Named Desire," which was acted at the Ethel Barrymore last evening. And Jessica Tandy gives a superb performance as a rueful heroine whose misery Mr. Williams is tenderly recording. This must be one of the most perfect marriages of acting and playwriting. For the acting and playwriting are perfectly blended in a limpid performance, and it is impossible to tell where Miss Tandy begins to give form and warmth to the mood Mr. Williams has created.

Like "The Glass Menagerie," the new play is a quietly woven study of intangibles. But to this observer it shows deeper insight and represents a great step forward toward clarity. And it reveals Mr. Williams as a genuinely poetic playwright whose knowledge of people is honest and thorough and whose sympathy is profoundly human.

"A Streetcar Named Desire" is history of a gently reared Mississippi young woman who invents an artificial world to mask the hideousness of the world she has to inhabit. She comes to live with her sister, who is married to a rough-and-ready mechanic and inhabits two dreary rooms in a squalid neighborhood. Blanche - for that is her name - has delusions of grandeur, talks like an intellectual snob, buoys herself up with gaudy dreams, spends most of her time primping, covers things that are dingy with things that are bright and flees reality.

To her brother-in-law she is an unforgiveable liar. But it is soon apparent to the theatregoer that in Mr. Williams' eyes she is one of the dispossessed whose experience has unfitted her for reality; and although his attitude toward her is merciful, he does not spare her or the playgoer. For the events of "Streetcar" lead to a painful conclusion which he does not try to avoid. Although Blanche cannot face the truth, Mr. Williams does in the most imaginative and perceptive play he has written.

Since he is no literal dramatist and writes in none of the conventional forms, he presents theatre with many problems. Under Elia Kazan's sensitive but concrete direction, the theatre solved them admirably. Jo Mielziner has provided a beautifully lighted single setting that lightly sketches the house and the neighborhood. In this shadowy environment the performance is a work of great beauty.

Miss Tandy has a remarkably long part to play. She is hardly ever off the stage, and when she is on stage she is almost constantly talking -- chattering, dreaming aloud, wondering, building enchantments out of words. Miss Tandy is a trim, agile actress with a lovely voice and quick intelligence. Her performance is almost incredibly true. For it does seem almost incredible that she can convey it with so many shades and impulses that are accurate, revealing and true.

The rest of the acting is also of very high quality indeed. Marlon Brando as the quick-tempered, scornful, violent mechanic; Karl Malden as a stupid but wondering suitor; Kim Hunter as the patient though troubled sister -- all act not only with color and style but with insight.

By the usual Broadway standards, "Streetcar Named Desire" is too long; not all those words are essential. But Mr. Williams is entitled to his own independence. For he has not forgotten that human beings are the basic subject of art. Out of poetic imagination and ordinary compassion he has spun a poignant and luminous story.

Brooks Atkinson was a longtime "watcher" of Tennessee Williams, and his reviews really showed his thoughtful understanding of what Williams was attempting. Williams loved to hear what Atkinson had to say, and they enjoyed a long private correspondence as well. On December 14, 1947, as the Streetcar uproar was in crescendo, he wrote another piece in the Times, expressing some reservations about the play. Now this is interesting: Atkinson, a discerning perceptive man, felt that the play was weakened because it arrived at no moral conclusion. The playwright takes "no sides in the conflict". He felt that Williams was limiting himself by refusing to come down on one or the other side.

Williams jotted off a note to Atkinson in response, which gives a feeling of their open communication:

Tennessee Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Dec. 15, 1947:

At last a criticism which connects directly with the essence of what I thought was the play! I mean your Sunday article which I have just read with the deepest satisfaction of any the play's success has given me. So many of the others, saying 'alcoholic', 'nymphomaniac', 'prostitute', 'boozy' and so forth seemed - though stirred by the play - to be completely off the track, or nearly so. I wanted to show that people are not definable in such terms but are things of multiple facets and all but endless complexity that they do not fit "any convenient label" and are seldom more than partially visible even to those who live just on the other side of "the portieres". You have also touched on my main problem: expanding my material and my interests. I can't answer that question. I know it and fear it and can only make more effort to extend my "feelers" beyond what I've felt so far. Thank you, Brooks.

Irene Selznick describes the opening night:

In those days, people stood only for the national anthem. That night was the first time I ever saw an audience get to its feet, and the first time I saw the Shuberts stay for a final curtain ... round after round, curtain after curtain, until Tennessee took a bow on the stage to bravos.

In general, at least in terms of critical acclaim, Brando was not singled out. It is only retrospectively, that people seemed to understand what had happened. But actors knew. Directors knew. Insiders knew what it was they were seeing.

Here is Robert Whitehead on Brando in Streetcar:

There were no models for Brando. His relationship to the sounds and poetic reality of Williams was particularly embracing; what Tennessee wrote, both in relation to the age and Marlon's sensibility, it all worked ... That particular kind of reality existed in a way that it hadn't ever before.

Here is Maureen Stapleton:

It goes well beyond talent. It's male. It's talent plus.

Joan Copeland, actress, younger sister to Arthur Miller, said:

Watching [Brando in Streetcar] was like being in the eye of the hurricane.

Blanche Dubois, scene 1, in Streetcar Named Desire:

They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!

Dakin Williams (Tennessee Williams' brother):

Blanche is Tennessee. If he would tell you something it wouldn't be necessarily true. And Blanche says in Streetcar, 'I don't tell what's true, I tell what ought to be true.' And so everything in Blanche was really like Tennessee.

Tennessee Williams on the set of the Broadway production of Streetcar Named Desire

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December 2, 2009

The Murderer I Befriended

The murderer I befriended knew all the United States capitals, even though he was Irish. He began to rattle them off for me, his brogue thick and rich, the words "Boise, Idaho" coming at me through the din of O'Neal's Pub.

The murderer I befriended had a name so Irish that it could have come out of an old dusty book of Celtic legends.

The murderer I befriended had a sidekick with him named Aidan, a bloke who got way too drunk and became so enslaved by an attack of hiccups that he seemed possessed by some demonic force. I feared for his health, actually.

The murderer I befriended was quite concerned over the behavior of my friend Allison, who had never been to Ireland before. She kept getting up to stroll through the bar, stopping to talk to people, moving on, stopping with another group. She would disappear for half an hour at a time. The murderer I befriended referred to her grumpily as "Walkabout". "So where's Walkabout?" She would then come back and regale us with the stories: the sexually explicit conversation she got roped into with that rowdy group of Australians over there, the random guy who cornered her and asked her to go home with him over there... She would tell us all this, and then proceed to walkabout again. The murderer I befriended said to me, with a grim look on his face, "Walkabout is playin' a very dangerous game."

The murderer I befriended taught carpentry in a juvenile detention center, so that the underprivileged trouble-making kids could have a useful craft when they got out.

The murderer I befriended told me of his time in the United States, driving around with truckers, going north, south, east, west. The murderer had lived in Chicago for eight years and had hooked up with a nice American girl. The murderer had a daughter he had never seen.

The murderer I befriended told me that if he saw Osama bin Laden on the street, he would gladly kill him for President Bush. I thanked him for his kindness and consideration.

The murderer I befriended had a hard and once-handsome face. Blunt angry features. A rough shock of hair and a mouth that twisted off to one side. Not always, but sometimes, when he was contemplating something unpleasant or worrisome. The thought of Osama bin Laden on the loose made his mouth go off to the side. He watched Walkabout saunter by on her way to another group of people, his eyes following her, and then he briefly shook his head, his mouth twisting off to one side. But what really stays with me about the murderer I befriended were his eyes. They were an icy white-blue and startlingly light, gleaming out of his rough bludgeoned face. They were the eyes of a sled-dog, of Buck, a once-loving animal, one of God's creatures, who has had the softness and love thrashed out of him. The murderer's eyes were like that. I guess it's true that eyes are windows to the soul, although I've never really thought about it all that much. I perched on a bar stool, beside the murderer I befriended, and we talked about America, and we talked about his job, but his icy eyes gleamed up at me, from out of a pit of darkness.

The murderer I befriended kept saying my name, repeatedly, in between topics. A pause would descend, broken only by a violent hiccup from the sidekick. And then the murderer I befriended would sigh, to himself, "Ah, Sheila …" He said my name with a long "e", like I prefer. It sounded like something other than a name, when said by him, in that sighing regretful way. It sounded like a sad prayer.

The murderer I befriended of course did not present himself to me as a murderer immediately. His confession (for that, indeed, was what it was) came much later. Our banter began casually, organically, as banter always does in Ireland. He had the wit, the quickness, the humor, the anger of his people running in his veins. It was a pleasure conversing with the murderer I befriended.

We stepped outside the pub for a smoke. When Allison and I had entered O'Neals, after spending the afternoon with the Book of Kells at Trinity College, the light was disappearing from the sky, an early descent of evening over Dublin. But now it was full-on night. The sidewalks buzzed with smokers. The murderer and I did not join any bigger groups, we stayed apart. We seemed to have some sort of understanding, he and I, on a primal human level. I suppose you could say that I found a kindred spirit in the murderer that I befriended. We had been talking, non-stop, for three hours. He smoked. We didn't speak. Until he did.

"Sheila, I need to tell you somethin'. I need you to know who I am and what I done."

The mouth twisted off to one side.

I was nervous that he was about to profess his love slash lust to me, and I wasn't interested in him in that way. But I held my tongue. The streets were shadowy now, but I could still see his eyes.

"Sheila, I murdered a man. I did eight years prison time for it, Sheila. I'm not allowed to leave Ireland now, and so I can't know my own daughter. But I murdered a man, Sheila. I took his life."

I was not surprised by this revelation. His time in jail was on his face, etched into the lines around his mouth, and coming out of those eyes. I still didn't speak.

"I was a kid of eighteen, Sheila … and I went up to Belfast, y'know … there was a Protestant guy up there … who had tortured 26 Catholics, Sheila …he tortured 'em, and I went up there and I found him and I slit his feckin' throat."

It was then that my soul re-coiled from him, for the first time. I had been laughing with the murderer for hours. And he had done this thing.

He was watching me intently, his eyes scanning my face for its response. Anxious hungry eyes.

"I slit … a man's throat, Sheila …" he said again, the words landing flat and cold between us.

It takes commitment to slit someone's throat. It takes commitment and a willingness to be involved. This was not a clean bullet to the back of the head. This was slaughter. I tried not to imagine it.

Then he backed off from me. "Oh, you're gonna think differently about me now … I can see it …" He was dismayed. "I just felt like I could talk to you, Sheila … I felt like I could confess my sins to you … like you might understand me or somethin'…"

It was eight p.m. on a Friday night in Dublin, Ireland. But I suddenly had no idea where, when, or who I was. I felt chosen by the murderer. He had chosen me.

"Nobody knows what I done … well, Aidan does … and that's why we're friends for life … he knows … he knows what I done."

Silence in my head.

"This guy tortured 26 Catholics, Sheila. He tortured 'em. He loved torturing 'em."

And so, in his world, this Protestant deserved what he got. He deserved to meet the murderer I befriended with the ice-blue eyes in a dark alley somewhere in Belfast.

Was Walkabout playing the dangerous game, or was I?

Finally, I figured out what I wanted to say to this beaten-down Irish sled-dog. It wasn't comforting or trite or spoken from my own world of obvious right and wrong. It was a question. Something I wanted to know. And so it came out very simply.

"Can you live with what you did?"

I expected something else. I expected, I guess, more of the "tortured 26 Catholics" story. But instead, the hard armor over that face cracked back, terrifying, and out came agony. Agony unlike anything I have ever seen before, and agony I hope never to witness again.

"No. I can't. I lie awake at night. I can feel his throat between my hands. Oh Sheila … Oh Sheila … what have I done … what have I done … I see that man's face before me … every night … I'm gonna pay for what I done when I meet my Maker. I'm gonna pay for it. I took a man's life, Sheila. Sheila. I took his life."

All around us the sounds of flirting laughing snippets, the buzz of groups, the talk. I might as well have been on a quiet dark planet at the farthest end of the galaxy. With the murderer I befriended.

More than regret, more than sorrow, what I saw in his eyes was fear. Fear of the retribution of God.

"I know it's coming, Sheila. I have to pay for it. And I will. God stares down at me. He's starin' down at me right now. He's not angry, Sheila. He's just waiting. He's just waiting."

And suddenly I could feel the Presence, too, filling these dark chattering streets, and God's searchlight rested, immovably, on the murderer I befriended. It had been there all along.

Munch's "The Scream" has always seemed a little humorous to me: the psychedelic colors, the writhing figure, the gaping O-mouth. I have seen it so many times that it feels like third-hand information, fourth-hand. Nothing about my response to the painting is original or deeply felt. I know the image by heart, and that twisting figure had nothing to tell me. It was only then, watching the murderer I befriended break down, seeing the terror in his eyes, hearing his voice say over and over, "I'm gonna pay for what I done … I'm gonna pay, Sheila … I'm gonna pay for what I done …" that I understood. That I got Munch's message. The murderer I befriended had that gaping O-mouth of terror shining out of his icy eyes.

It was terror too great to be borne.

It was torment of the eternal kind.

It was facing the great abyss revealed by the pitiless searchlight of God.

When I came home to the United States, I did some research, looking for evidence of the murderer’s crime. I wondered if his release from prison had been part of the Good Friday Agreement. But his name was nowhere on the books. I asked a friend who had been involved in the political and military world of Northern Ireland to do some digging. The murderer’s name was nowhere to be found. There was no evidence of a lone Catholic from Dublin coming up to Belfast to slash a Protestant’s throat in retaliation for political torture, and there was also the fact that Lenny Murphy, psychotic head of the Shankill Butchers, had gone around slashing people’s throats left and right until he was finally killed by an IRA squad (who used 26 bullets, apparently, one for each person Murphy had tortured). The coincidence of the number was too great for me to ignore. 26. It made me think.

Perhaps the murderer I befriended had thought that if I believed it was an act of political violence I would absolve him or admire him. Perhaps he lived in a fantasy world where he was the avenging spirit of the Irish. Perhaps he had killed someone in a bar fight and merely wished that his murder had been for a greater cause.

Perhaps what he did was far far worse than an act of political violence. Perhaps what he did was something petty, small and mean. Maybe he just wanted to get into my pants. I guess I will never know.

But I do know this.

The murderer had done something to make his eyes look like that.

Something was on his conscience. Something had been lost, forever, back there. The gaping O-mouth was engraved into his face for good.

The murderer knew that God was patient. God could wait for the murderer I befriended to die of natural causes. God could turn His attention to other matters. There was no rush. But God would not forget. God had the murderer's name in a little black book. There were not enough years in eternity to make God forget "what he done", whatever it was.

And so the murderer I befriended hangs out with his hiccupping sidekick.

And so the murderer I befriended teaches kids from the Dublin slums how to build bookshelves and cabinets.

And so the murderer I befriended goes out drinking every night to obliterate the self that had done this terrible thing, to block out that patient searchlight.

He waits.

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O'Malley faces

My beautiful family.

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December 1, 2009

Lucy's feet

Uhm. Wow.

(Booties made by Mum)

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That'll Learn Ya reunites

That'll Learn Ya was a band formed at URI, and their heyday was when I was a student there. Their success as a local band was not only on the URI campus, although that was their main fan base. If you are a Rhode Islander of a certain age, you remember That'll Learn Ya. The lead singer, Terry Fallon, was somehow involved in the theatre department at URI, although it was right before my time, but I remember seeing him around. They were stars. Their shows jangled with energy, and their songs were fantastic. Brendan was the big fan - he was obsessed with them. In January 2008, he wrote a blog-post about one of the songs of theirs he remembered: "Robert DeNiro Movies" (a hit, if there ever was one). Read Brendan's reminiscences, and then check out the comments. Of Rhode Islanders who remember.

That'll Learn Ya was pre-Internet. Those old cassettes of their albums ... where are they now? Find-able? Yes? No? I was talking with my brother about That'll Learn Ya this past weekend, and talking about memory. We are of the generation that straddles that divide: the tech-boom divide. We remember 45s, and turntables, and lifting the handle of the damn record player arm to drop it down into the exact groove we wanted. We remember things having to LAST, because ... that was the technology at the time. It was up to us to hold onto things, keep them close and well-preserved, because if you lost such-and-such? Where would you get it again? Nothing was forever. Things disappeared back then. If you lost something, you couldn't find it again. There was no instantly-accessible Web archive where you could immediately look up any damn thing you wanted.

So That'll Learn Ya disappeared. For 20 years. Brendan is an obsessive, like myself, and he searched, for years, for those old cassette tapes - the only evidence he had of That'll Learn Ya's music. Then, suddenly, we've got the Web, we can reach out, we can put things out there into the universe, asking for help in finding something - because, whaddya know, it turns out that things DON'T disappear. Not if you remember them. But that was totally not the case back in the late 80s. I have so many memories of scouring the TV Guide on a weekly basis to see if certain things would play that week, TV movies I had seen once, 4 years before, and was DYING to see again. That was the only way I would know. What if Orphan Train plays at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday night and I don't know about it? That means it will be yet another 4 years before I can see it again. My memory of it was strong, but the ability to re-live, re-watch, re-listen - was minimal back then. This is a world that has completely vanished in one generation. Rather extraordinary, no?

The last comment on Brendan's post is from July of this year and it reads:

Recently TLY put together a Facebook profile. They uploaded a bunch of their songs with Robert Deniro Movies being one of them. There is also a possible reunion coming together.

When That'll Learn Ya joined Facebook, there was a ripple effect among my friends from Rhode Island. One after another after another "became fans" of That'll Learn Ya, and it was so strange, so good to 'see' those guys again, even though I did not know them, and haven't seen them play in two decades. What have they been up to?

Then came word that they were playing a reunion show on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at The Ocean Mist, a fantastic bar (basically a huge rickety SHACK on the beach, with a deck that the waves roll right under) - and the timing could not have been more perfect. Brendan was going to be in town for Thanksgiving. He was out of his mind. That'll Learn Ya? Reuniting? At the OCEAN MIST? While he was home? What??

On Saturday, there was the O'Malley Thanksgiving. An emotional day. Everyone left at around 6 p.m. and I totally could have gotten into my pajamas right then and never left the couch for the rest of the night. That'll Learn Ya was playing on the bill with, I think, 4 other Rhode Island bands. They were going up third, which meant they wouldn't start to play until 11 p.m. I'm an old lady. Even older now that I just had my birthday on Friday. At 6 p.m. it was inconceivable that I could be awake long enough to get my ass down to the Ocean Mist. But we were going to meet up at Jean and Pat's beforehand, and then all head down, so I succumbed to O'Malley peer pressure (so glad I did), and hung in there. Lucy was at Pat's parents' house, so the two of them were coming out too. Very exciting. Brendan and I drove over to Jean and Pat's. It was a chilly night. Everyone was sitting out on the screened-in porch. Some people there didn't remember That'll Learn Ya, others did - and we all were heading down to the Mist in one hilarious caravan. We wanted to get there by 9 p.m. After the intensity of the day, it was nice to just hang out and relax.

Jokes were made about how dead it was going to be that night at The Mist. Pretty much everyone on that porch has worked at The Mist at some point in their lives, and Katie was on call that night. She was "third" on the list, and she was hoping she wouldn't get called. Someone had stopped by there earlier that night and reported that it was totally dead. My view was - even if it was just US there, it wouldn't matter - it would be a great show. However, judging from the frenzied response on That'll Learn Ya's Facebook page, I had a feeling the place would be packed. It was Thanksgiving weekend, a perfect time. Many of us from that generation no longer live in Rhode Island, but we come home for the holiday. We would all be there. I don't know. I thought the joint would be jumpin'. And whaddya know, at about 8:30, Katie's cell phone rang. She was being summoned to the Mist to work. Which meant the crowds were arriving. Which meant they needed help behind the bar. Which meant it would be packed.

Exciting!

We all got into our respective cars and took off down route 1. Bren was driving. The road up and down outside the Mist was lined with cars. People were parking illegally, with abandon. We cruised up and down the strip looking for a space. "I have never seen it like this," said Bren. We finally squeezed into a spot that said "No Parking" directly above it, but everybody else was freely blocking fire hydrants, crosswalks and driveways, so we threw our hats into the ring. The ocean was crashing on the beach to our right, that ever-present roar, as we hurried along the street to the bar. We walked into the Mist and the place was packed, wall-to-wall people. I ended up seeing tons of people I knew - the biggest surprise being Ram, an old friend from high school. Crazy! But there were also people there that I have known, basically, my whole life. People I played tag and hide-and-go-seek with, T-shirts stained with popsicles and fudgsicles. Childhood friends. Nuts. It was awesome. I was SO glad I wasn't in my pajamas, at home, and the next morning Brendan would say to me, "It was so great, Sheila - wish you had been there." So glad.

During the show, the huge space in front of the stage crammed with people, people dancing and jumping up and down and taking pictures - shouting along with the songs, songs none of us have heard in 20 years, but the lyrics remain intact in our head - Jean leaned over and whispered to me, "I have never seen it like this." Jean has worked at the Mist for years. It was a special special night. You could feel it in the air.

But. I really must pass the baton now to my dear brother Brendan, an amazing writer - he brings me to tears on a regular basis. He did a write-up of the show which is not to be missed, even if you've never heard of That'll Learn Ya. Because we all have those things in our lives - music, a book, a movie - that reminds us of another time, a time when we were young, different, hopeful, sad, whatever. And these things, while they may seem ephemeral, hard to pin down, are actually not. They are as solid, as tangible, as the ocean pounding the sand beneath the Mist. It is strangely comforting. Rediscovering this helps us remember who we are.

Nothing goes away.

Here is Brendan's review of the That'll Learn Ya reunion at the Ocean Mist, on November 28, 2009.

And again, check out the comments. Love, remembrance, acknowledgement, excitement, plus a comment from one of the band members himself.

One of the most beautiful nights I have had in recent memory.

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