Lance Mannion

Such nice, friendly, warm-hearted people, those tea party folks…if only they weren’t deranged!

New stories portraying tea party types as nice, friendly, well-meaning, thoughtful people, like this one in the New Yorker and this one in the New York Times, baffled me when I first read them.

“But these people are deranged!” I’d think.  “Their politics are insane.  Look at the signs at their rallies.  Listen to what they say.  They’re fruitcakes!  They have raisins for eyes!  And they’re seething with rage.  They are talking themselves into turning violent.  How can a reporter come away from a conversation with any of them thinking that the most salient point about them is what good folks they are at heart?”

Yesterday, though, I came away from a conversation with a couple of tea party types thinking, What a nice couple.

First, keep in my mind where I met them---in the cafe at Barnes and Noble.  They were sitting at the next table, which, like mine, was piled with books and magazines they were browsing through---no wonder Steve Kuusisto refers to B & N as “the loitering library.”---and as far as I could see none of those books or magazines were explicitly political, although I learned in talking with them that the book the man was reading, about the nature of human thought, had political implications in his mind.

They were older, in their seventies, pleasant-looking, and cheerful.  They were the kind of people you smile at and say hello to for no particular reason when you pass them in the street, but otherwise nobody out of the ordinary, and I probably wouldn’t have taken much note of them, except that they were involved in a lively discussion with people at a table across from them and the woman was saying, “That’s why they’re coming across the border by the busload!  It’s not working for them!”

She meant busloads of Canadians who couldn’t get the treatments they need at home because Canada’s socialist health care system was horrific, just like England’s!

I couldn’t help myself. 

“Oh come on!”

And she said, “Oh oh.  Another liberal!”

And we were off to the races.

You don’t need me to get into the details of their arguments.  It was exactly what you’d expect.  Liberalism equals socialism equals communism equals fascism.  The President is an evil genius and a moron.  The government can’t run anything right but yes, they’re on Medicare and they like it, but it’s not a government program really, because they paid for it, and anyway it doesn’t really work and anyway again it won’t be here in a few years, the Democrats are out to destroy it nevermind that it’s a Republican Congressman pushing a budget that explicitly eliminates Medicare and, while we’re at it, Social Security.  Socialism has never worked.  Sweden doesn’t count.  Socialist programs don’t deliver.  France and Canada don’t count.  Except as examples of how national health insurance doesn’t work.  Don’t forget those busloads of Canadians.  No, they haven’t seen them.  But they’ve heard about them.  Liberals like me don’t know the truth because we get our news from the liberal media.  They know because they get their news from…

You guessed it.

We went back and forth for a little while, but I got embarrassed.  I don’t go to Barnes and Noble to listen to other people argue politics and I figured neither did all the people around us.  Besides, there was as little chance of my talking them out of any of their positions as there was of their talking me out of mine.

I tried backing out of the conversation as tactfully as I could by apologizing for having stuck my nose in and interrupting their reading.

That’s when they turned…nice.

They began to apologize too.  She reached out and laid her hand on my wrist and invited me to pull my chair over.  Together the three of us steered the talk away from politics and onto other things, mainly the story of their lives.

They’ve been married for fifty years.  They’re Catholic.  He’s a retired college professor.  They ran a bookstore for years and years.  They love Shakespeare (although it’s too bad they don’t teach the plays in England anymore because they’re considered racist) and his favorite editions of Shakespeare’s works are the little blue books from Yale, which they were both thrilled to hear that I also own because my parents gave them to me for my eighth grade graduation.

When you get down to it, as I explained to the Mannion guys on our drive home, they were the blonde and I in another twenty-five years or so.

Except for the paranoid politics, I hope.

But that’s what it is, a hope.

Because I don’t know how afraid I’m going to be when I get to be their age.

And that’s what they were, afraid.  Not in a timid, too scared to leave the house, on the verge of tears way.  In a brave face-your-fears because there’s nothing else you can do way.

Despite our mutual determination to keep the conversation friendly and away from any more politics, it kept creeping in, and what became clear was that neither one had any more hope left for the future of the country.  As far as they could see, everything was collapsing.  It didn’t really matter that Obama was out to destroy Medicare because in a few years there won’t be any money left to pay for Medicare.  Ditto, Social Security.  There banks and the insurance companies are rapacious and corrupt but nobody can do anything to stop them and they’re going to eat us and themselves up in a hurry.  Hospitals and doctors are going to go bankrupt trying to treat all the old people who’ll be flooding into the waiting rooms as life expectancy increases and Baby Boomers live to one hundred and five, except that they won’t live that long, because they won’t be able to pay their medical bills and anyway doctors don’t know what they’re doing.

The future as far as I could see they saw it will belong to a ravening, raving mob of hungry, desperate, sick illiterates----our schools have failed, kids don’t learn anything, nobody reads anything, let alone Shakespeare, it’s all the fault of liberals who have been running our education for fifty years, but it doesn’t matter, really, who’s to blame, we can’t pay for good schools anyway.

There are days when I share this nightmare.  In fact, I should say, there are fewer and fewer days when I don’t.

I didn’t talk with them long enough or intimately enough to draw any conclusions about how deeply they’ve internalized these fears or to tell how long they’ve felt them and where they come from, if they come from sources other than too much watching of FoxNews.

I did learn that he was still recovering from an operation that almost killed him back in the fall.

I have no way of knowing how much this contributed to their sense that the world as they know it is coming to an end but the fact is it almost did.

The Tea Party movement is still mainly a force for Democrats and Progressives to reckon with because of its potential to provide Republicans with an angry and therefore motivated cadre of voters.  The way to counter it is to excite and motivate Democratic and Progressives and get them to the polls come November.

There is no point trying to win them over.  Only nine per cent of them voted for Obama to begin with.  In and of themselves they are more likely to produce more Right Wing Republican candidates than Republican victories. 

But the world as they know it is always ending for somebody. 

Death makes sure that none of us wake up in the same world we went to bed in.

Losing a job, taking a new one, getting sick, losing friends,  watching children grow up, getting old, seeing the world change and then go on without any notice being taken of our former place in it and without any sign that it cares about us or what we have lost it’s all terrifying and maddening and terribly sad.

We have nobody to turn to for comfort but each other, but when everybody’s just as scared and just as angry and just as sad, where’s the comfort?

That’s why there are churches.

That’s why there are mass political movements.

There’s safety and comfort in numbers.

Especially when you’re given an explanation that not only solves everything but gives you something to focus your thoughts on beyond your sadness and your anger and your fear.

I called the couple from Barnes and Noble Tea Party types. They  don’t belong to the Tea Party.  Yet.  There’s no Tea Party around here for them to join.  Yet.

There aren’t enough actual Tea Party members to affect the outcome of many elections.  What there are are a lot of people who are afraid.

The world as they knew it has already come to its end.  Their vision of the future is bleak.  And as far as they can tell nobody who has the power to change it cares or even seems to notice how bad things are.

Of course it doesn’t help to have a major political party that’s decided that its way back into power is by reassuring people that their world is in fact coming to an end, that Death and Destruction are manifest and coming for them in the form of Muslims and Liberals.

But it doesn’t help either to have another political party that can’t seem to rally itself behind its own programs and plans for making the future a brighter and more inviting and less frightening prospect.

In the end, though, this is not a political post anymore than my conversation with that couple was a political argument.

I would have liked to have been able to convince them that things will get better because health care reform will pass and will actually reform some things, that there’s still more stimulus money to be spent, that the jobs bill will create jobs.

But I probably did more to change their minds about the way the world is headed just by owning those little blue editions of the Yale Shakespeare and by being there with a pair of polite and friendly and well-behaved teenage boys who had stacks of books on the table in front of them.

The world as we know it ends everyday…

…and starts all over again.

Some keep the sabbath by going to church

Along the Wallkill River. New Paltz, NY.  A week ago today.  Sunday morning, March 7, 2010.

“You were a bear. A great, big bear.”

The closing of one of my favorite episodes of Northern Exposure.  Chris reads Paddle-to-the-Sea and Holling delivers the perfect two-sentence eulogy for Jesse the Grizzly.  This was probably the first time I heard Enya too.

“Joanie, could you possibly set the bar any lower?”

If you’ve been following Doonesbury, you know that apprentice CIA “asset” Jeff Redfern, son of Rick Redfern and Joanie Caucus, hasn’t been having a good month.

He shot down a helicopter in Afghanistan.

Wait for it.  Took a second to sink in on his mother too.

Joanie:  Jeff shot down a helicopter? All by himself?  How terrifying for him to…to…The Taliban don’t have helicopters, do they?

Rick:  The Taliban don’t have socks.

It was an accident.  Could have happened to anyone, says Jeff.  He was at a wedding in a village up in the mountains when the helicopter, carrying a USO troupe coming to entertain the troops in the area, appeared to the cheering of the crowd below.  Jeff decided to celebrate in what he thought was traditional tribal fashion by firing his automatic rifle into the air and put a round through the helicopter’s gear box.

Again, his mother was reluctant to get her head around it.

Rick:  I cannot believe this kid!  How could we have raised such a total screw-up?

Joanie:  Well, at least he didn’t kill anybody.

Rick:  Joanie, could you possibly set the bar any lower.

If you think Rick is a little harsh there in calling his own son a total screw-up you aren’t a regular reader of the strip.

It’s hard to tell how old the main characters are since Garry Trudeau himself doesn’t seem to know anymore.  He’s been letting them all age but not in real time like Gasoline Alley.  Joanie ought to be pushing 80 by now, but she appears to be only in her early to mid-60s.  I think she was meant to be in her 40s when Jeff was born, which would make him be in his 20s now.  He’s only a few years out of college.  He dropped out but like his former roommate Zipper and the original Doonesbury gang he might have been on the 7 or 8 year plan so he could be in his late 20s.  I take him to be about 22, 23.

Too old to be a kid.  Young enough, though, to be excused for not being a full-fledged grown-up.

The history of domestic life is full of screw-up sons who continued to trouble and disappoint their parents well past the age when they should have developed some common sense, adult competence, and the ability to cross the street on their own without getting hit by a bus or causing accidents as cars brake and swerve to avoid them in their oblivious pursuit of some goal vital to their immediate satisfaction.

And there have been enough late bloomers among these hapless and foolish hobbledehoys that the type has been a staple of comedy since the Greeks. 

In the usual plot arc these guys are saved from permanent irrelevance and adolescence by meeting the right girl.  They snap to and grow up on the spot as soon as she says “Yes, I will marry you, Osgood!”

Which leads to another staple of comedy, the stodgy and grumpy and threatening (to young men) successful older man who turns out to have been a total screw-up or juvenile delinquent in his own salad days.

P.G. Wodehouse’s stories and novels are as crowded as the gallery at the stock exchange with this type of old man, like Sir Watkyn Basset and Sir Reginald Glossop, to name just two, who were as feckless, wild, thoughtless, blockheaded, carefree, and as nice and decent-hearted when they were as young as Bertie Wooster and his friends from the Drones Club are in the books’ present.

Jeff has become Doonesbury’s resident Drone.

But with this difference.

I don’t get the impression that Trudeau is as fond of Jeff or as forgiving towards him as Wodehouse was about Bertie and Bingo Little and Freddie Widgeon.  Just the opposite.

Trudeau seems to me actively hostile to Jeff.

And I don’t think it’s the case that Trudeau is reacting to his own creation after the fact, as if mistaking Jeff for a real and autonomous human being; it feels as though he uses Jeff in order to work out his hostility towards a real and autonomous human being.

Could be I’m over-identifying.

I’m pretty sure that conversations like the one between Joanie and Rick took place nightly at the old Mannionville homestead when I was between the ages of 18 and 25 or so. 

But Trudeau has done this before, grown apparently hostile towards a character and then brought that character back again and again for the sole purpose of being shown up as a jerk and a fool.

Mike Doonesbury’s ex-wife, J.J.

Trudeau didn’t treat Mark Slackmayer’s greedhead dad or even Richard Nixon with as little sympathy he does J.J.

Even before she ran off with Zeke, Duke’s useless and parasitical caretaker, J.J.’s role had become mainly to behave badly, mixing selfishness with self-delusion with self-righteousness in various combinations to make Mike’s life a regular adventure in humiliation.

At the beginning with J.J. it was the case that Trudeau was satirizing a type, the self-indulgent, self-involved minor artist who mistakes his or her adopting of the latest fads and trends for an independent artistic “vision.”

There came a point, though, when Trudeau’s attitude towards J.J. appeared to switch from satirical to judgmental, when J.J. seemed to do things she did because, well, she would.

J.J. was no longer a victim of a cultural foolishness she had bought into along with a lot of other types like herself.  She was consciously and deliberately acting on impulses she had every reason to know would hurt both herself and Mike.

This is true to life in that there are people who realizing they have been accidentally hurtful and destructive double-down.  They become even more hurtful and destructive in order to punish either themselves or the people that are mad at them for their past bad behavior who, they feel, should have either forgiven them or saved them.

I’ve believed for a very long time that Garry Trudeau has been doing something more than turning out a brilliant comic strip.  He’s writing the satirical novel of our times, working more in the vein of Anthony Trollope in the Barsetshire and Palliser novels and The Way We Live Now and Anthony Powell in his Dance to the Music of Time than in the vein of…well…Garry Trudeau when he started out.

I’d have thrown Evelyn Waugh in there with Trollope and Powell except that Waugh is angrier and more judgmental and more of a prig towards his characters than either of them, even as Trollope and Powell seem more aware of the broader range of human frailty and folly.  For Waugh, bad behavior is mainly defined as what other people do to offend people like him.  For Trollope and Waugh, bad behavior is what we all do as a matter of course along with the good.  And that is generally Trudeau’s opinion too.

J.J., then, was Trudeau’s most Waugh-like character.

And now I’m wondering if that contempt has been shifted towards Jeff.

Like a family curse.

Here’s the thing.

Jeff is J.J.’s half-brother.

Here’s another thing.

The two of them share a trait---a habit of letting grandiose dreams carry them away---with the character who is becoming the heroine of the strip.

Alex Doonesbury.

Who is J.J.’s daughter.

Jeff is Alex’s uncle.

J.J. and Jeff are Joanie’s children.  Alex is her grand-daughter.

I have no way of knowing if Trudeau has been thinking anything about the question of nature versus nurture.  None of the three seem to have inherited much from Joanie, but maybe there are things about Joanie’s selfish jerk of a first husband, Clint, we don’t know enough about.  Clint raised J.J., but Jeff was raised by two of Trudeau’s favorite characters, Joanie and Rick, while Alex was raised by two other favorites, Mike and Kim.

But here is an example of the way the comic strip has become novelistic.  In novels characters routinely double and shadow each other.  (By the way, this often happens without their authors’ being consciously aware of it.  Writers make a lot of choices because they feel right.) As J.J.’s daughter and Jeff’s niece Alex can be expected to share some family traits.  She naturally resembles them in some way, just as she’s inherited her father’s nose.

But resemblances aren’t recapitulations.  On Alex, that nose is cute.  And it is a symbol of her inherent decency.  Alex is a beautiful young woman but not because she is a traditional beauty.  She’s beautiful because she is who she is.

And it’s the same with the character traits she’s inherited from J.J.  Both mother and daughter have artistic temperaments and a tendency to dream big too fast.  In her head Alex was accepting the Academy Award for her documentary on Lacey Davenport before she’d shot her first interview (and she was filming it on her cell phone without seeing any problems with that) and she sees her boyfriend Toggle as a rich and powerful force in the music industry even though his one professional gig so far has been as a substitute assistant sound engineer for series of GPS voice-overs.

But Alex has a practical side that Jeff lacks and J.J. only exhibits when her back’s to the wall.  And she is far more self-aware and self-judgmental than either of them.  She not only knows when she’s screwing up, she expects herself to screw up.  Her dreams may be self-aggrandizing but her realistic opinion of herself is, if anything, too harsh and limiting.  She is easily carried away but she is also a little too quick to pull herself back.

If Jeff and Alex are each other’s shadow, then it may be that Trudeau isn’t just beating up on Jeff for the sheer, mean pleasure of getting something out of his system.

He’s using Jeff’s goofiness to highlight what is good and endearing in Alex while allowing us to keep in mind that she, like all of us, can be frail and foolish in our ways.

I just hope that at some point soon we find out that when he was a young war correspondent in Vietnam Rick accidentally caused an air strike to be called in on B.D.’s platoon’s position.

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Toning down the party, turning up the emotional intensity

Even at their best, the movies Robert Altman made in the 1970s weren’t conventionally disciplined works of art.  Altman was no formalist.  He didn’t compose scenes, either on the set or through the lens, so much as capture moments of serendipitous composition.  He set his actor loose in a crowd of their co-stars and waited for one or two or more of them to find ways to stand out if only for a second or two and that would be his shot.  He composed by disarranging.  Somewhere in Mitchell Zuckoff’s Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, Altman’s described as being like an action painter, which I take to mean that he lets what looks accidental imply the thought and the movement that created it.

If that does describe his method, then it applies to both how he used the camera and how he directed his actors. 

The distending drips and wild splatters of images, dialog, emotion that appear on the screen seem spontaneous are the result of careful and controlled choices made before the camera started to roll and corrected and revised in midflow as Altman saw where the paint was pooling and where the canvas was being left imposingly and appropriately blank.

This is Nathaniel Rich reviewing The Oral Biography in the New York Review of Books:

The deepest contradiction with Altman lies in this disparity between the spontaneous, anarchic feel of his films and the rigorous planning that produced them. It's certainly true that he encouraged improvisation on set, and had a genius for seizing on fortuitous accidents…

…he gave his actors little by way of specific advice ("I don't direct my actors") and encouraged them to diverge freely from the script. (Altman's screenwriters, incidentally, are about as fond of him as his producers.) He made his actors feel like equal collaborators in the filmmaking process; in interviews he called them his "artists." Yet many speakers in the biography suggest that this was a pose. "Bob's great facility as a director is he would get the actors to do the things he wanted them to do, but they thought they came up with the idea themselves," says the producer of McCabe & Mrs. Miller. "He made actors believe that they were doing something for him that they couldn't do anywhere else," says the writer Buck Henry. "I'm not sure that was true—but the belief was true. An Altman set was different because everyone felt they were collaborating—of course they weren't."…

Altman's use of sound was even more dexterous. He refused to redo dialogue in the studio, preferring live sound, even when actors muffed their lines; he made obsessive use of ambient noise; he had every actor wear a personal microphone so that he could, in editing, modulate the levels of each individual voice; he even invented the first eight-track sound mixer: "I wanted to force the audience into a situation where...they wouldn't necessarily hear everything that was said." The experience of watching his films is not unlike being in a crowded bar, when your ear catches the most salient phrases while ignoring the rest. But if you pay attention you can always tell when Altman is turning his knobs, selecting which voice should dominate and which should fade out. Though the effect seems naturalistic, it is the result of artful contrivance.

An approach like that can look lazy, if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

It can get lazy.

You can look at the movies made after Nashville and find evidence that Altman had suddenly stopped trying.  The techniques are the same, but the control isn’t there or it lapses.  Buffalo Bill and the Indians, A Wedding, and Popeye contain moments and whole scenes as brilliant and exciting as any in his earlier masterpieces but they come across as more accidental.

And O.C. and Stiggs , A Perfect Couple, and HealtH come across as accidents---as in car wrecks.

Something else was going on behind the camera too.

By all accounts, working on an Altman film was a whole lot of fun.  If you take the backstage scenes in Buffalo Bill in the Indians as self-portraiture, with Altman having divided himself into the grand mountebank of Paul Newman’s Bill Cody and the savvy, practical, manipulative producer-genius of Joel Grey’s Nate Salisbury, then life on an Altman set must have been a happy mix of partying and work, with the work often indistinguishable from the play except in its being even more fun.

But it may have been that the party became the point.  Again, you can watch these movies and find reasons to suspect that the movies had become an excuse to throw a party.  The actors are obviously having fun, but with each other and for each other, and they’re not bothering to let the audience in on the joke.  Some scenes appear to have been put on the screen because something had to be filmed that day to justify continuing the party.

Given Altman’s energy and his work habits it’s unlikely that if you were on the set you ever saw him do this, but there are moments where you can sense him mentally sitting back in his chair with his arms folded, just relaxing and enjoying the sight of his friends having a good time.

Here’s Robin Williams talking about Altman and the drugs and drinking and the fights and love affairs on the set of Popeye:

Bob was the ringmaster.  I think he was of watching it, setting it up, kind of taking delight in watching.  I think it was the idea of putting together a three-ring circus as a movie.

What this means, if true, is that Altman had lost interest in the artistic effect of what he was putting on film, or at least wasn’t concentrating on it, and he wasn’t worrying about the audience and what they would see and how they would like it.  In a way, actually, he had an audience of one, himself, and he was a little too easily amused.

And there’s a damning quote from Altman himself in Zukoff’s book:

It’s hard to talk about the audience because I don’t really think of the audience that much.  I really don’t.  I think they have a responsibility to pay attention and appreciate what I do.  It’s like all the Campbell soup cans---that’s the multitude.  They’re all the same they’re stamped and turned out.  On inspection, one is defined by the one next to it.

Plenty of artists have felt this way, but painters and composers and writers and musicians don’t need someone to give them million of dollars in order to begin their next piece of work.

Movie directors do and they get it from people who get their money from audiences who hand it over with the expectation that it will buy them a good time at the movies provided by a director who’d made it his job to provide it.

If what went wrong for Altman in the late 70s was a loss of control, of technique, of his actors, and of self along with a creeping disdain for his audience, then you could argue that the many plays he directed in the 80s for the stage and for film, would have been the perfect cure.  You can’t forget your audience in a theater.  You can’t let your actors wander about a stage willy nilly because the audience won’t know where to look and there’s no camera to do the looking for them.  You have to adhere to the script because that’s all the audience have to tell them what’s happening and what characters thirty or more feet away are thinking. 

And now when you look at the movies Altman made in the 90s and the early 2000s, like Vincent and Theo, The Player, Cookie’s Fortune, Gosford Park, you can see that Altman was exercising greater control than ever before and not only that but enjoying the freedom that comes from having limited oneself, and from that argue that he had learned lessons from directing those plays and operas or at any rate re-taught himself lessons he’d learned back when earning his reputation as one of television’s best directors for his work on Combat and Bonanza.

I haven’t come across anything in The Oral Biography that suggests that Altman thought of the 80s a learning or re-learning experience.  I can’t find anything that suggests he thought he needed to learn or re-learn anything.  He took on the jobs in order to keep working and he needed to work.  It wasn’t like Wordsworth consciously deciding to write nothing but sonnets for a while in order to get back to basics.  People had stopped giving him millions of dollars to make movies.

Still, it is the case that when directing a play Altman was more constrained by the script than he had ever allowed himself to be in the 70s, and when he was given the chance to direct big-budget, big cast movies again he didn’t shake off that restraint.  His style became more conventional or at least more conventionally bound, but Nathaniel Rich thinks that these late-career movies had new virtues the old masterpieces lacked.

Altman in his last decade was no longer the same filmmaker who gave a boy mechanical bird wings or staged the political assassination of a country-and-western singer or cast a shirking, mumbling Elliott Gould in the role of Philip Marlowe. But some of his late films demonstrate a depth of emotion that surpasses his earlier films, which often ended with his characters numbed by trauma or blissfully immune to it. There is nothing in those films like the scene in Short Cuts where a wife learns that her husband, unwilling to leave a fishing trip prematurely, waited three days before reporting his discovery of a woman's corpse in a river; or the final twenty minutes of Gosford Park, in which the lives of aristocrats and their servants, cooped up together for four days in 1932 at an English manor, converge in a powerful emotional crescendo. Altman the gambler may have lowered his bets, but he never left the table.

So that’s where we’ll start tonight, with the development of those new virtues in two of the plays Altman turned into movies, Streamers and Secret Honor.

Rich:

A fascinating distillation of Altman's style can be seen in Secret Honor, his 1984 adaptation of a one-man play about Richard Nixon. Altman, in severe financial difficulty at the time, had accepted a film professorship at the University of Michigan. Down to a cast of one, and forced to finance the film out of his own pocket, he transformed a college dormitory into Nixon's study and shot the film in seven days, with graduate students serving as his crew, and a score performed by the student orchestra. Philip Baker Hall's Nixon is an astonishing portrait of paranoia and bravado, qualities enhanced by Hall's unusual recitation of the script. He digresses, trails off in the middle of sentences, interrupts himself, talks about two different subjects almost simultaneously; he manages, in other words, to recreate the effects of Altman's trademark overlapping dialogue—as a monologue.

Stop the tape here, Roberto, and rewind it to where I talk about Popeye.  We’ll pick it up there next week:  Thanks to Phil and Chris and GregM for carrying on the discussion.  Comment threads on these posts remain open.  Please add your thoughts.

Don’t forget!  Next week we’re wrapping things up with a live-blogging of Popeye.  Mark your calendar.  We’ll be starting earlier, at 9:15 PM Eastern, Thursday, March 18, then update your Netflix queue, visit your local library, or buy the DVD now.

Please help keep this blog running strong by making a donation.

Re-programming note: The First Virtual I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival resumes

Ok, let’s try this again.

Sorry about flaking out last week.  Due to circumstances beyond our control…yadda yadda.

But we’re on for tomorrow night, Thursday, March 11, at 10 PM Eastern.  Please join us for the penultimate gathering of the First Virtual I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival.  We’ve got two movies on the bill or two plays, depending on how good a job Altman did adapting them to film, Streamers and Secret Honor.  If you haven’t seen either and won’t get to them by tomorrow night, don’t worry.  Ante up anyway, because I have a feeling the discussion’s going to focus on Altman’s overall work as a director more than on those two specific films.

You can prepare by reading this review of Mitchell Zuckoff’s Robert Altman: The Oral Biography in the New York Review of Books.

Yeah, I hate homework too.

Consider this work for extra credit then.

Ebert’s review of Secret Honor.

Here’s Matthew Modine, one of the stars of Streamers, talking about what he learned from working with Altman.

Here’s Altman himself talking about casting his films:

 

And if you want to spoil it for yourself, here’s Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon challenging his sainted mother’s ghost at the end of Secret Honor:

Going less postal

The mailbox here at the Mannionville homestead.  February 27, 2010.

Seems to me that if your business is in trouble a sure way not to save it would be to make yourself less reliable, less responsive to your customers, less of a bargain compared to your competitors, and less a part of people’s daily concerns and thoughts.

Yet this has been the US Postal Service’s business model for years, decades even.

The Postmaster General is once again desperately pushing to end Saturday delivery.

Also, there’s going to be another rate increase.

I happen to think it was a dumb idea to make the Postal Service a quasi-quasi-private enterprise and ask it to pay for itself.  It’s like expecting elementary schools, police departments, and the United States Army to turn a profit.  The mail must go through and it should do it without anyone worrying if it did it at a loss.

I am sentimental about snail mail.  I’d rather find one post card in my mailbox---the real one at the end of our front walk---than twenty five emails.  A single photograph in a greeting card is more beautiful than a whole album posted on Facebook.  I send out Christmas and Hanukkah and birthday cards and I wish more people on my list would reciprocate.  I love the e-cards you created, but I love them even more because I can take them out of a box from time to time and look at them, and I can do that because I print them out.  I’d love them even more if you’d printed them out and mailed them to me.  Know why?

Because then there would have been a physical demand upon me to love it.  I would have had to walk outside to the mailbox, pluck it from the mailbox, open the envelope, maybe even suffering a paper cut, and then I’d have held it and admired it and looked at it, not at a rearrangement of pixels on a computer screen, it, a thing that you touched, and in that process I’d have felt you.

Snail mail is vital, as in alive, and its importance is in its vitality, in its being a piece of your life and then of my life, of my life and then of your life, in its being a thing that we both touched.  Through it we touched each other.

Snail mail is a hug, a pat on the back, an arm around the shoulder, a handshake, a held hand, a kiss.

I’m not talking about bills and solicitations of course.  Those are hands reaching for my pockets.

Snail mail is contact.

And not just between you and me.  Often when I go out to the mailbox the letter carrier is just pulling up and she leans out the window of her truck to hand me the mail and we chat a bit.  When I need to mail something to you I hike into town to the post office, nodding and saying hello to my neighbors along the way.  At the post office, I greet other people coming and going, I talk to the clerks behind the counter, I pet someone’s dog waiting patiently outside, I dodge cars as I cross the street and wave thank you to their drivers for not running me down.  It takes a village to mail a letter.  The thank you note landing in your mailbox is a souvenir.  It’s contact with a particular place and the people who live and work here.

And that’s partly why the government should keep its post offices open and bustling.  The necessary business of the country that’s done through the mail can be done over the internet.  The sense of the busy-ness of the people doing that business cannot be transmitted.  In sending and receiving snail mail we get mixed up in that busy-ness, we get mix with other people, we make contact between ourselves and people living other sorts of lives in places not at all like the places where we live.  That Arizona postmark, that stamp from Borneo, they are exciting because they draw our imaginations in and through them we travel.  The mail is the physical connection our minds need to feel the reality of other people and places.  That feeling of connection to people outside ourselves, outside our tribe, and to places beyond our little private garden, leads to sympathy, understanding, consideration---it is the basis for a civilized society. 

It is the beginning of a democratic society.

One of the first grand public works projects our nascent Federal government took on was post roads---See, we were a liberal government right from the start, building things, expanding the infrastructure, creating jobs.---which it did because the Founders understood that the free and easy flow of information between the far-flung towns and villages and settlements of the new Republic was necessary to knitting people together as the People.  A Democracy on a continental scale would only work if we had an informed citizenry who understood that they shared interests, economic, social, cultural, and spiritual with far away and invisible strangers.

Back then the only way information traveled was by physical contact between human beings.  It was delivered hand to hand, mouth to ear.  They would not have imagined the exchange of information as anything other than a physical act, as occurring in any way other than by people mixing and mingling, and they would have regarded that mixing and mingling as integral to the exchange.

And it’s that mixing and mingling, that passing along of information through physical contact as both medium and method inseparable, that I think the Government should be promoting, not only by encouraging it but by working actively to make it happen and keep it going. 

Delivering the mail isn’t a side-business the Government has become stuck with.  It is part of the business of governing.  Privatizing the mail is like privatizing democracy because it makes the flow of information that democracy can’t exist without something to be bought and sold and therefore something that can be owned and controlled by those few who can pay the most for it.  Ordering the Postal Service to make money, even if only enough to break even, is part of the ongoing conservative effort to commodify all that ought to belong to all of us and by doing so make it theirs.  Theirs to sell, theirs to hoard.  Theirs to use as a way to control us.

It won’t surprise you then that I think that instead of raising the price of stamps, the Post Office should be slashing it, that instead of shuttering branches, it should be opening more, building new one ones and remodeling old ones, that instead of cutting workers, it should be hiring.

CBS’ Brian Montopoli is confident that Congress won’t let the Postmaster end Saturday deliveries.  This is good news because Saturday is the one day of the week when most people are home to get their mail from their letter carrier, the one representative of the Federal Government they have anything like a regular and personal interaction with.  Which brings me to another reason the Government should be doing more to promote sending snail mail and improve services and not cut them or make them more expensive.  Most of us have only two regular encounters with the Feds that we’re aware of, and one of those is with that part of the Federal Government known as the IRS. 

Even a pro-tax, wealth-redistributing liberal like me can’t get through tax time without wincing.  I understand that paying taxes is a good thing, I even believe that it’s not just the rich who are under-taxed, but I still resent coughing up the money, just a little, but still.

Which leaves it up to the Post Office to provide people with a positive impression of their own government and give them the sense that the Feds do something for us and that it government exists for that reason, to do things for us.

No amount of nostalgia on my part changes the fact that paying bills online is the future and the future is now, that it won’t be long before Netflix is streaming all their movies, that its quicker and easier and cheaper to send a photo by cell phone than to buy a post card, address it, stamp it, and walk around looking for a mailbox to drop it in, if you can find a place that sells post cards.  One of the shops I used to buy my post cards on the Cape has stopped carrying them. 

And, as if I have to tell you, I am a cheerful and enthusiastic participant in the virtual world.  I blog, I Twitter, I text, I spend way too much time on Facebook.  Family movie night this week will feature Starman streamed from the computer to the TV, no visit to the mailbox or the video store involved.  I love the internet and I’m enjoying the technological wonders of the early 21st Century.  But for me, it’s all gravy.  I don’t need it.  I don’t rely on it.  And I don’t see it as a replacement for things I needed and relied on way back in the 20th Century.

It just gives me more options and more tools, that’s all.

My netbook might as well be surgically attached to my left hand, but I still don’t go anywhere without a pen and a pad of paper.  I have some photos I plan to post on Facebook, but you know what?  You’re still getting a post card.

Now, if you’ll excuse me.  It’s a nice day.  I’m walking down to the post office.  I’ll say hi to everyone for you.

The Mannionville Daily Gazette Week in Review: March 1-March 8, 2010

Last week was a sad week for those of us on the West Side of the Bandwidth.  We lost one of our blogging champs, Modest Jon Swift, known to his family, friends, and colleagues as journalist, author, and film critic Al Weisel.  Wednesday’s post contains links to tributes to Al and to Al’s self-selected Best of Jon Swift blog posts.

As for the week that was here in Mannionville, Tuesday I wrote a letter to corporate headquarters advising them that I really didn’t want fries with that or whatever else they’re forcing their sales clerks to try to foist off on me in the checkout line.

On Wednesday, I was feeling more humble and I vowed to be less a less grumpy blogger.

I had to reschedule Thursday night’s installment of the First Virtual I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival.  We’ll be discussing Secret Honor and Streamers this week, March 11, pushing Popeye to the 18th.

Friday I heard that there are plans to make a movie out of the old TV show Gilligan’s Island, news that filled me with a nameless dread, although I did wax curious about the how they’d cast it.

Saturday I linked to a newspaper article about the arrest of some local drug dealers who seemed to have borrowed their business model from the TV show Weeds.

Also, on Saturday, 16 year old Ken Mannion competed in a a karate tournament and took home one of these trophies.

Sunday was a beautiful day here and all the birds were happy about that, including the crows.

Sunday night, as a prelude to the Academy Awards, I reposted the one review I wrote of an Oscar-nominated film.  The review’s titled Up, George Lucas, the Spirit of Adventure, and the myth of the fallen angel.

I was going to spend Sunday night trying to write reviews of A Serious Man and Julie & Julia, but 14 year old Oliver Mannion read my review of Up and decided I needed to have some important things about Star Wars and the Force explained to me.  He took the computer away from me and wrote a post, There is no death, there is the Force.

And that catches us up.  Maybe I’ll get my reviews written tonight.  Unless Oliver decides there’s something else his old man has completely missed the boat on.

There is no death, there is the Force.

Hi, I’m Oliver Mannion and that title is the final line from the Jedi code. Now I corrected my dad about the Force in his Up review. He said the Force may represent the good in everyone. This is not true. The Force is indifferent. It has a light and dark side as they say in the movies. A yin and yang. And since I’m talking about about Star Wars stuff I would like to say love does not lead to the dark side. It is passion that does that. Now to quote Jolee. What. Who’s Jolee you ask? He is a character from Knights of the Old Republic a great Star Wars game. He is an old man with a dry wit who you find on the Wookie’s home planet. He used to be a Jedi before he crashed there. He was also in love. He is my favorite character in the game. Anyway if you talk to him enough when you gain enough levels he gives you this advice:Love does not lead to the dark side. Passion can lead to anger and hate but passion is not the same thing as love. Controlling your passion while in love is what they should teach you to beware! But love itself will save you not condemn you. Wow that was a tangent. But to quote Jolee again:I’m old damn it! I’m entitled to a rant now and then!

Oscar night writer’s guilt

You’t think with ten movies nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture this year the odds that I’d have seen some of them would have increased over the last couple of years.

But I did worse in 2009 than in 2008 and 2007.  Percentage-wise.  I saw exactly the same number of Best Picture nominees each year before the Oscars.  Three.  Up, A Serious Man, and Avatar, and as I said at the time, I don’t feel like I saw Avatar.  For some reason, it lost me at the beginning, I never got caught up, and the experience was like watching someone playing a video game in the next room. Out of the corner of my eye.  Through a half-open door.

But I loved Up and I’m rooting for it to do the impossible, win Best Picture and Best Animated Feature.

I re-posted my review of Up below.

Of the movies that picked up nominations in any of the other major categories, I’ve seen Julie & Julia (Meryl Streep for Best Actress), Up and A Serious Man (both also nominated for Best Original Screenplay).

So I’ve got little in the way of a rooting interest and no basis for an opinion on who or what should win.   But I’ll still be watching.  I won’t be live-blogging.  I might Twitter a thought or two.  But I will be writing.

My plan is to try to write up reviews of Julie & Julia and A Serious Man before Best Picture Winner’s announced. 

Ok, we’re live from the Red Carpet.  I’m going to work.

Oscar Night Re-Post: Up, George Lucas, the spirit of adventure, and the myth of the fallen angel

Originally posted in May 2009.

Don't think I'm giving anything away by telling you that Up is heavily influenced by Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

You think I'm kidding?

Consider this.  To fulfill a promise he made to his late wife, Carl Frederickson, the Spencer Tracyish old man who's the hero of Pixar's latest, flies his house to South America.  The name of his precise destination, the place he and Ellie dreamed of visiting, the mysterious land where their childhood hero Charles Muntz disappeared on his last adventure?

Paradise Falls.

The other day, a commenter on my post on the Toggle-Alex romance in Doonesbury called me "insufferable."  Imagine how insufferable I could be if I followed this line of thought to any depth.

So I'll just follow it into the shallows.

A major influence on the makers of Up is George Lucas.  There are quotes from and allusions and oblique references to Star Wars and Indiana Jones throughout.  There are references to Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Terry and the Pirates and other movie serials and comic books that influenced Lucas, and to the pre-motion picture days writers who influenced the writers and producers of those works, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Conan Doyle.  In fact, visually, Paradise Falls---

---is a direct quote from the silent movie adaptation of Conan Doyle's The Lost World:

Through Lucas all those old books, movies, and comic strips have entered the imaginations of two generations of young movie-goers who never saw or even heard of the originals.

It's been said that Lucas, with a little help from Steven Spielberg, brought the spirit of adventure back to movies.

The Spirit of Adventure is the name of Charles Muntz's airship and the ideal that Up celebrates.

Milton gets in there through the story of Anakin Skywalker---there's a swordfight in Up that conjures up images of the light saber duels between Luke and Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.  Well, a sword and metal cane fight.---and Anakin's story---Vader's story---is a retelling of Lucifer's, the fall of the brightest and most beloved angel.

All the old stories inform each other, so I'm not insisting on a direct connection.  But the story of how the best of us can undone and destroyed by our vanity is an old and important one.  I think it's a story that has faded from Americans' collective memory, even though it ought to be one of our national myths, the cautionary tale we tell ourselves over and over again.  Lucas brought it back, although it doesn't seem to have sunk in yet.  But he's made it familiar enough that the makers of Up could gloss it without having to spend time developing it.

How a hero can turn into a villain and why this individual tragedy isn't necessarily the story's end, how it can even lead to a happy ending, is the theme of the Star Wars saga.

Through the fall of Anakin, through the failures of Obi-wan and Yoda, through the redemption of Han Solo, and the triumph of Luke, Lucas reminds us again and again that heroism isn't a quality belonging to an individual, it's an ideal that an individual attaches himself or herself to.  The hero serves the ideal and when he loses track of that truth, when he mistakes himself for the cause, he is doomed.

Dooms himself.

Anakin is ruined by his vanity.  Obi-wan and Yoda are blinded, weakened, even corrupted a bit, by their devotion to the Jedi Order and to a political system that they have mistaken for an ideal.  Luke is saved, and saves others, through his selfless devotion to an ideal, which, by the way, is not the Force, but the goodness inherent in the individual heart.

Unless that's what the Force is.

Carl and Russell, the nerdy little Junior Wilderness Explorer who unwillingly comes along on the adventure but then joins in enthusiastically, are a very unlikely pair of heroes but they are heroes and recognizable as heroes despite their weaknesses and shortcomings, because of their devotion to the ideal the movie's villain was once devoted to but abandoned for the sake of vanity and ego.

The spirit of adventure.

______________

A few quick thoughts in place of a review:  Up rates pretty high on my personal Pixar meter.  Fourth, I think.  Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Up. After that it's Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Wall-E, Finding Nemo, and Cars.  Toy Story is in a class all by itself.

This is the second Pixar  in a row in which the audience is treated to a long stretch that is essentially a silent movie.  Actually, Wall-E was a silent movie.  Its very little bit of dialogue was unnecessary and was practically just sound effects.  In Up, almost all the important exposition and most of Carl's character are given to us without dialogue.

Of course, Pixar has been delivering silent movies regularly.  All but one of the shorts that have played before the main features have been silent movies.  The one that wasn't, Boundin, was the worst, the only complete failure.

Up feels a little underpopulated.  There are only four developed characters, and one of them is only on screen for a few minutes.   None of the dogs, not even Dug, has much of a personality.  On the other hand, that one character who disappears from the movie less than a third of the way through is so vividly portrayed that we continue to see her and feel her presence throughout the whole rest of the movie.  Ellie is Up's spirit of Adventure.

The 3D isn't necessary.  After my first "Wow!  That's so cool!" moment when the white letters of Walt Disney Presents appeared to float in the air of the theater halfway between my eyes and the screen, I forgot all about it.

I liked it that the 3D glasses are shaped like Carl's heavy-framed specs though.

Courting crows

Nevermind the several inches of snow still on the ground and what the calendar says about the equinox being two weeks away.  It’s a beautiful spring morning here.  Bright blue sky, the smell of mud in the air, streams of melt water running down the streets, and all the birds are singing love songs, even the crows.

Well, crows don’t exactly sing.  They may think that the metallic, grinding noises they make are songs.  To human ears it often sounds like someone’s trying to make a bed with a sheet of corrugated tin.  Stokes tells me one of their vocal affronts to beauty is their rattle call and they only use it in the spring when they’re negotiating marriage.

Crows are monogamous and mate for life.

In the spring, those large ominous flocks that gather in the trees near your house at dusk in the fall and winter as if to tell you that your life is shortening as surely as the minutes of daylight and your fortune and mood and expectations will be dominated by darkness break up.  Crows start hanging around in small groups made up of, probably, a mated pair of adults and their not yet mated offspring from the previous year.  Probably, says Stokes, because crows haven’t been studied as closely as other birds.  I wonder why this is, unless it’s because crows are so smart that if you set out to study them you’ll soon realize they are studying you back and that unnerves ornithologists who as a species are perhaps shier and more easily spooked than other scientists.

Crows are not romantic.  They only bother with courtship rituals early in the morning and probably feel as though they’ve gotten off to a late start if they’re still at a time when lollygaggers like me have finally pushed themselves out the door to get bagels, as they were and I did, around eight this morning.  They have better things to do with their days, I guess, and like to get the lovemaking out of the way.  The rattle call is apparently just an announcement of an intention to procreate.  They are all business when it comes to courting.  One crow approaches another, bows, lifts its wings slightly as if to say, “What do you think of the gun show?” and the other crow replies, “Looks fine to me.” And that’s it.  For life.

I’m acquainted with a few human couples that mated with just about as little fuss and sentimentality.  Theirs are among the strongest and most long-lasting marriages I know of.

I hope you’re enjoying as pleasant a Sunday morning as the birds, but with a little more romance and song than the crows seem to need.

Photo by Kevin J. McGowan, courtesy of Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Waiting for the winners

Outside the gym at sixteen year old’s karate tournament.  Yesterday morning.  Saturday, March 6, 2010.

One of these rode home with us and is now standing on our mantle.  Second Place for Sparring in the Green Belt Division (Adults).

Our own little private corner of Agrestic

For most of us the life of Nancy Botwin, the drug-dealing suburban mom who's the main character of Weeds, would be a nightmare.  For the first three seasons, it was a nightmare for Nancy.  But as the demands of her career have become increasingly more dangerous and deadly, Nancy has not only grown less frightened by it and more thrilled with it.  She's enjoying herself even as she watches herself and her sons turning into monsters.  That, of course, makes her life even more of a nightmare for that part of the audience who aren't sociopaths.

But what looks like a nightmare to some of us is just another chapter of the American Dream for others.

Deputies bust pot-growing venture; 3 held

Harvested plants uncovered during previous traffic stop

BRIDGEVILLE — Sullivan County sheriff's deputies uncovered the remains of a major marijuana growing operation Tuesday near Monticello on Southwoods Drive after following up on an arrest last week.

Deputies said they found grow lights, dozens of transformers, large pots, reflective material on one of the walls, timers and ventilation systems, all indications of a sophisticated growing operation.

Deputies pulled over a U-Haul van and a car on Exit 108 for traffic violations during the snowstorm Thursday afternoon. The deputy noticed a strong odor and asked to search the van. The back of the van was filled with garbage bags. Some contained cut stems, but behind the driver's seat were 30-gallon bags stuffed with marijuana, deputies said.

About 28 pounds was recovered, but deputies now say three men arrested that day had the capability of producing $1 million worth of pot in a year.

"It appears we caught them on their way out of town," Undersheriff Eric Chaboty said Tuesday.

These guys knew what they were doing too.

NYSEG linemen determined that the electric meter had been bypassed. The occupants have paid the minimum $14.49 monthly service charge for electricity since Aug. 3, 2009. Authorities believe the growing operation started around that time.

If I remember right, it was the spike in the power usage that caught the Feds' attention and brought them to the door of Nancy's grow-house.  Or am I thinking of an episode of Numb3rs?

Doesn't matter.  The main thing is that as Nancy's discovered, pot growing is not a business for amateurs.

Authorities believe the three men might be affiliated with the Trinitarios, a violent and fast-growing Dominican street gang.

Read all of Victor Whitman's story in the Times Herald-Record.

Casting the Castaways

I hear there’s going to be a movie version of Gilligan’s Island and naturally I’ve got something to say about that, but to do it I have to say something about Sex and the City first.

TV Guide produced a TV show last week called Television’s Greatest Blunders and one of these great blunders was Dana Delany’s decision to pass on the role of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City.

Ridiculous.

This was only a blunder if Sex and the City was going to be a hit no matter what and that Delany could have and should have known that at the time.

There is more reason to think that the show would have failed miserably with Delany in the lead.  That’s not a knock on Delany.  Almost every show put on the air fails for one reason or another.  Hits come along like freaks of nature and while lots of smart people can say why after the fact very, very few can say why a show that hasn’t aired will be a hit and be right in more than a stopped clock way.

One thing that hit shows have in common, though, is a cast the audience falls in love with right away.

Especially the leads.

Sarah Jessica Parker is the better actress, but more in her favor is that she is the more compelling screen presence.  Delany’s pretty in the wholesome former cheerleader/girl next door way.  Parker is pretty in a way that defies conventional notions of prettiness.  She’s actually sort of weird looking.  Plus, at the time the show went on the air in 1998, Parker was 33 years old, Delany was 42.  Much of Sex and the City’s charm (if you thought it was charming.  I did, to my own surprise) depended on Carrie’s little girl lost mixture of haplessness and pluck.  She’d get herself lost in the woods, surrounded by lions, tigers, and bears, and then almost accidentally shoo them away mainly by being cute.

That act began to wear thin while Parker was still in her 30s because Parker, naturally, began to look less and less like a little girl.  A young woman in her early 30s who felt stuck in at the same point in her career and her love life that she was at when she was in her middle 20s can flail around desperately and still be sympathetic.  A middle-aged woman---or man---flailing like that instead of adapting or finding mature alternatives starts looking pathetic real fast, which is why one of the themes of the show became how Carrie and her friends were growing more realistic and practical, which is to say how they were becoming grown-ups at last.

Delany would have had to play Carrie as a grown up from the beginning or risk humiliating herself, and that would have been a very different show.

But here’s another thing.

Good casting isn’t just putting the right actor in the right part, it’s putting the right actors in the right parts together.

If Delany had been Carrie, the cast around her would have had to change to complement her.  The producers might have chosen another Charlotte, a blonde instead of the brunette Kristin Davis, perhaps, because they worried that two brunettes couldn’t be told apart at a glance.  Or they might have gone with a different actress as Miranda because Cynthia Nixon and Delany were both tall and willowy.  Or decided that Kim Catrell was too much like Delany in her conventional former cheerleader prettiness.

In fact, the two are such similar types that Delany could have been cast as Samantha just as well.

It might have turned out that Delany had no chemistry with Chris Noth and who else could have played Big?

Good casting is everything, as Robert Altman says in that video clip I posted Wednesday, and it’s contingent.  Sex and the City was about those four actresses in those four roles, same as all movies and TV shows and plays are about their characters and the actors and actresses playing them.

Now, about a movie version of Gilligan’s Island.

First, who needs it?

Unless you’ve never seen the show, my guess is that the fun’s going to wear off right after the Jonas Brothers sing the theme song.  Five minutes in, after the seven stranded castaways are introduced you’re going to start thinking, Why aren’t I just watching old episodes of the original TV show?

Unlike Get Smart or The Addams Family----the only two TV shows whose movie adaptations came close to being as good or as fun as the originals, until Star Trek---Gilligan’s Island didn’t have a plot or a theme.

Underneath the silliness, Get Smart was a spy story.  It was about good guy secret agents thwarting bad guy secret agents.  The Addams Family was about a collection of weirdos and misfits confronting a conventional society that has no use for weirdos and misfits.

Gilligan’s Island was about keeping the castaways stranded on the island so that there could be another episode next week about keeping the castaways stranded on the island.

Either the movie will be an hour and a half episode, the wiser course for the producers, so that we spend the whole time waiting for the inevitable, Gilligan to save the day and screw everything up at the same time, and like l said, Who needs that when you can just watch an old episode?

Or there will be a PLOT.  And Hollywood has a terrible track record when it comes to adding PLOTS to movies that don’t come with one built in.

Concept + PLOT generally = something like Wild, Wild West.

Then there’s the casting.

Except for one of the seven, the castaways aren’t so much characters as stock characters that have been around since the Greeks wore masks.  The inept servant, the blowhard boss, the dreamy intellectual, the sex kitten, the girl next door, the spoiled society matron.  Just about anybody who fits the general physical type could play them, and my bet would be on the producers casting just about anybody.  They could go with gimmick casting and try to cast stars but then they’d better be able to sign stars and not “stars” for all the parts or it will look pretty cheesy.   Think of Tom Arnold as Quentin McHale or Jim Varney as Jed Clampett. 

I’ll be getting to that one character who’s an actual character in a minute, although I’m sure you know which one I’m talking about, but he and the Skipper are the only ones who offer you some flexibility in choosing for physical appearance.  The Skipper is only fat because Alan Hale Jr. was fat.  He needs to be big, as a contrast to Gilligan, and for the authority that comes with size and to look protective.  But he doesn’t have to be played by a John Goodman.  Although Goodman would be a fine choice. 

But Gilligan has to be young and thin and goofily cute but not handsome.  Ginger has to be tall, leggy, curvy, and red haired or else she wouldn’t be called Ginger.  Mary Ann has to be smaller than Ginger, perkily pretty, and look scrumptious with the tails of her calico shirt knotted under her breasts.  The professor should be slim and handsome but somewhat nerdy, like Gary Cooper in Ball of Fire.  Mrs Howell---Lovey---has to be elegant and middle-aged and retain something of the debutante who would have earned the nickname Lovey.  Other than that, the actors don’t need to be much of anything else.

Except good together.

The job is not to cast individual characters.  The job is to cast a troupe of character actors who work well as a group.

Now, about that one character who stands apart and stands on his own.

Thurston B. Howell III was the character Jim Backus made of him.  Mr Howell was created for Backus and Backus made the most of it.  He owned the role more completely than Don Adams owned Maxwell Smart or John Ratzenberger owned Cliff Clavin or Steve Carrell owns Michael Scott.

I’m not sure how much of a contribution Backus made to the actual writing, although the dialog in his scenes is so much sharper, wittier, and more idiosyncratic that I wouldn’t be surprised that he was ad libbing his way through every episode.  But if the words weren’t written by him he made them his.  And he made Mr Howell such a combination of spoiled brat, clueless pantaloon, conniving snake oil salesman, and overgrown little boy that the writers were able to use him as a villain in some episodes, as a bumbling father figure in others, and as a hero of some more.  With Backus in the role, the writers essentially had nine people to work with on that island.

I can’t imagine who can play the part without turning it into an imitation of Backus---and again we’re back to, Why not just watch the show?---or trying to make Mr Howell into his own role, in which case you begin not to have a movie version of Gilligan’s Island.

But then I wouldn’t have imagined Raul Julia as Gomez Addams before he was cast or that Julia, who had never seen the original Addams Family before he got the part, would have been so blown away by John Astin that he would turn his performance into an homage to Astin---fortunately Julia was good enough that he could do this without making it an impersonation of Astin.

I’m not saying a Gilligan’s Island movie can’t be done well, although the odds are heavy against it.  I’m just saying the casting is going to be tricky.

But there is one aspect of the original show that I don’t see how a movie version will be able to deal with.

Sex.

To be more accurate, the absence of sex.

In 1966, a show that was about some young and very attractive people stranded together on a deserted island could get away with pretending that the young and attractive people wouldn’t notice that they were young and attractive and act upon it.  Gilligan and the Professor were assumed to be as blind as little boys to the fact that Ginger and Mary Ann were girls, and, despite Ginger’s occasional vamping, she and Mary Ann were only that much more aware of sex than a couple of sixth grade girls would be than their younger brothers.  The four of them were very tall children because most of the audience was made up of children and to them life on a desert island would be no phone, no lights, no motor cars, not a single luxury, but they wouldn’t count sex as one of those missing luxuries.  Parents knew better but they were glad to let it slide because of the kids.

The audience for the movie is not going to be little boys and little girls.  In fact, the producers are going to to do everything they can to make sure it isn’t.  They want the theaters full of teenagers and twentysomethings.

Who will expect that Ginger, a character based on Marilyn Monroe, will act like Marilyn Monroe and that Gilligan and the Professor, and even the Skipper, will respond accordingly.

And why would Mary Ann just sit by and watch Ginger get all the attention?

What this will likely mean is that the PLOT of the movie is going to include one, maybe two, love stories.

Mush. On Gilligan’s Island?

I’d rather just watch the show.

Programming note: Due to Circumstances beyond our control…

Sorry to report I have to postpone tonight’s discussion of Secret Honor and Streamers.  Stuff has come up.  No big deal, just one of those things.  We’ll do it again next week though and push the live-blogging of Popeye to the 18th.

Thanks for stopping by.  Feel free to treat this as an open thread on Altman if you’re bursting with thoughts you’d hoped to share tonight.

The Mannionville Daily Gazette’s Favorite Blog of the Day: A modest voice goes quiet

Modest Jon Swift.

For the memories, because the blog of the last great conservative has gone silent with the untimely death of its creator, the very witty, charming, but enigmatic Al Weisel.

Tom Watson provides an obit.  Jason Chervokas says goodbye to his old friend.

Update:  Skippy has posted links to tributes to Al.  It’s a veritable blog roll hall of fame of lists, appropriate since Al as Jon was one of the founders and chief promoters of Blog Roll Amnesty Day.

Programming note: Streamers and Secret Honor

Join us tomorrow night, Thursday, March 4, at 10 PM Eastern, for the penultimate gathering of the First Virtual I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival.  We’ve got two movies on the bill or two plays, Streamers and Secret Honor.  If you haven’t seen either and won’t get to them by tomorrow night, don’t worry.  Join in anyway, because I have a feeling the discussion’s going to focus on Altman’s overall work as a director more than on those two specific films.

You can prepare by reading this review of Mitchell Zuckoff’s Robert Altman: The Oral Biography in the New York Review of Books.

Yeah, I hate homework too.

Consider this work for extra credit then.

Ebert’s review of Secret Honor.

Here’s Matthew Modine, one of the stars of Streamers, talking about what he learned from working with Altman.

Here’s Altman himself talking about casting his films:

 

And if you want to spoil it for yourself, here’s Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon challenging his sainted mother’s ghost at the end of Secret Honor:

Trying to remember to count my blessings

Here in Mannionville, or pretty much anywhere, 2009 wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, and 2010 doesn’t look to be a whole lot more fun so far.

When things start to wear on me, I try to remind myself that, bad as it gets, there’s always someone who has it worse, because that’s what my mother taught me to do.

And when I forget, life has a way of making me remember it.

Back in the fall, when I was fighting my way through another bout of self-pity, my father-in-law had a stroke. He’s recovering pretty well although his right leg is never going to be strong enough to support him again and his best hope is that he’ll soon be able to ditch his walker for a cane.

Not too long after that, Uncle Merlin lost his father.

Things evened out a bit in November and early December, but I was getting gloomy again around Christmas, which is when one of favorite librarians had a stroke, far more catastrophic and incapacitating than Father Blonde’s and it’s still not clear how well she’ll be able to recover except that it won’t be very well. 

And this morning I said hello to a neighbor I hadn’t seen in weeks and asked him how he’d been.

“I being treated for prostate cancer,” he said.

I know people who have lost their jobs.  I know people who are dealing with divorce.  If somebody isn’t sick themselves, somebody they’re close to is.  The blonde’s aunt has a degenerative lung disease.  My aunt’s cancer has recurred.  A good friend’s father has Alzheimer’s.

There are young men and women marching off to Afghanistan and Iraq.  There are their mothers and fathers who have to watch them march off.  There are people who have to live in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There are a lot fewer people living in Haiti.

And I’m bummed because the basement sprung another leak?

Well, yeah, I am.

I’ve been counting my blessings, reminding myself that there are people who have far greater troubles, but so far that hasn’t plugged the hole in the foundation or taken an inch of water off the floor.

I still need to get down there with a mop and a wet-vac.

The wet basement’s a metaphor, by the way.

It’s a commonplace to say that someone’s so wrapped up in his problems he can’t think about anyone else.  But sometimes that’s like saying someone’s so swept up in the rapids he can’t see the shoreline.  We can hug problems to us like blankets and get tangled up in them.  So to speak.  But generally problems wrap us up, like pythons.  Or it might be better to say, rather than our getting wrapped up in them, they get wrapped up in us.  They get inside us.

We worry.  We’re anxious.  We’re uneasy.  We feel sick. Worry and anxiety don’t just cause spikes in our blood pressure, sour stomachs, headaches, weariness, illness.  They are higher blood pressure, ulcers, pounding heads, exhaustion.  They are dis-ease.

We have no other way of feeling our feelings except to feel them, and, boy, doesn’t that sound glib?  But it’s a fact.  We don’t just live inside our bodies, we are our bodies, and our bodies have to do all our experiencing for us, including our mental and spiritual suffering.  When our thinking gets un-well, our bodies feel it.  We get sick.

Works the other way too, because our brains are stimuli processing machines.  All we know of the world, really, is the part of it touching our bodies, which means all we know is what’s happening to us physically.

Our body gets sick then that’s what our brains know.  Sickness.

I could tell you “I’m feeling a little stressed today,” but I could say, more accurately, I am stressed or I am under stress because what is happening---what I’m feeling---is exactly what steel feels when it is stressed. 

I’m being pushed towards my breaking point.

I may be a long way from it.  I may be built to withstand a lot more stress.  The point is that the stress is a physical fact.  It’s not an abstract outside force.  It’s as measurable a change in my skin as in the skin of an airplane or the hull of a submarine.

I’m using me as a stand-in for you here.  And for him, and her, and them.  And me.  For all of us corporeal beings.

Counting blessings, remembering there’s always someone who has it worse, these are distractions.  Simply ways of telling ourselves not to pay so much attention to our selves’, our bodies’ dis-ease.

But we are still sick.

Times are hard.  That’s literally true.  The stresses and strains of the Recession are hard upon us.  They rub, they weigh us down, they wear us down.  We’re tired, we ache.  We slog around with pain in our hearts and minds that are like pains in our heads and backs and stomachs and legs because they are pains in our heads, backs, stomachs, and legs.  We’re sick, we’re diseased, and we’re infectious.

Telling ourselves to count our blessings, remember the people who have it worse off, maybe this doesn’t work to make me feel better, but it should make me think before I open my mouth to complain, make me feel foolish about what I’m about to say, make me shut up and stop whining.

I think I’ve fallen into a habit of complaining on the blog.  Not just about home repairs and annoying trips to the big box store and not being rich, and that’s what all my posts about money and the economy come down to, I’m not rich.  I hear a whine underneath everything I write about politics too.  I’m tired of it.

No, I’m not about to stop.  And there is a lot to complain about anyway.  What I’m going to try to do is write more.

At least, write more about stuff that doesn’t inspire me to whine but makes me feel like---well, not necessarily standing up to cheer, but to say, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

I’m going to try to be more like Kurt Vonnegut’s Uncle Alex.

And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, ''If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.''

That’s my new year’s resolution.  I don’t make new year’s resolutions on January 1.  I make them on February 28, because that’s the date I started my very first new year on.  My resolution is to try to notice when I’m happy and write about more of the times I do.

Won’t make me happy, but at least it won’t contribute to making you feel sick.

Unless I get all sappy and goofy about it.

Then I’ll probably whine about how I’m not whining enough.

A letter to corporate from a grumpy former customer

Dear Vice-President in Charge of Making Sure You Earn Your Christmas Bonus at Generic Chain Store Corporation:

Customers don’t care if you meet your sales goals.

Minimum-wage employees don’t exist so you can win that company trip to Hawaii.

The Economic Meltdown of 2007-2008 and the ensuing Recession did not cause the guy who was CEO of your corporation eight years ago to plunge the company into massive debt so he could empire-build, so stop blaming all the desperate ways you’ve come up with to gouge customers on “hard times.”

If your company’s current business model is to shake down customers for every single extra penny, cut services, hard-sell more of an inferior product or, worse, hard-sell one your customers really have no use for, reduce inventory to the point that products customers do have a use for and want now aren’t on the shelves, understaff shifts, cut jobs, cut wages, cut benefits, with the result of putting a demoralized and resentful sales staff on your floors, and otherwise scrimp, scrounge, and scramble not to increase profits as much as to raise stock prices and mollify creditors, start sending out your resume now, because that’s the Circuit City business model and look how it saved them.

But, please, above all, don’t try to make me part of your bonus and job rescue plan by having your clerks and cashiers keep me at the counter longer than I need to be while they pretty much beg me to spend money I can’t really afford to spend on something I don’t want, don’t need, won’t be glad I bought, and won’t make me want to come back to your store any time soon.

So, anyway, yeah, I bought the snack bundle, I picked up the extra batteries, I took the Grande instead of the Vente or the other way round, I can’t keep them straight, I super-sized, and I joined the Rewards program.  But only because I felt sorry for the pleading and desperate teenager behind the register.

You made your extra buck and a half off me today.  But I felt like an idiot and a sucker and a cheapskate and a heartless bum all at the same time, so you did not make the five, ten, fifteen, or hundred bucks you’d have made off me next week or month if I wasn’t so annoyed, guilt-ridden, and self-loathing that I’m going to avoid your store for at least the next year.

Sincerely,

One grumpy ex-customer