Lance Mannion

Granny Weatherwax and the practical difference between psychiatry and headology

Granny Weatherwax had never heard of psychiatry and would have had no truck with it even if she had.  There are some arts too black even for a witch.  She practiced headology---practiced, in fact, until she was very good at it.  And though there may be some superficial similarities between a psychiatrist and a headologist, there is a huge practical difference.  A psychiatrist, dealing with a man who fears he is being followed by a huge and terrible monster, will endeavor to convince him that monsters don’t exist.  Granny Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to stand on and a very heavy stick.

---from Maskerade by Terry Pratchett.

Terry Pratchett explains opera in one paragraph

Henry Lawsy peered closely at his opera notes.  He had not, of course, fully understood the events of the first two acts, but he knew that this was perfectly okay because one would have to be quite naive to expect good sense as well as good songs.  Anyway, it would all be explained in the last act, which was the Masked Ball in the Duke’s Palace.  It would almost certainly turn out that the woman one of the men had rather daringly been courting would be his own wife, so cunningly disguised by a very small mask that her husband wouldn’t have spotted that she wore the same clothes and had the same hairstyle.  Someone’s serving man would turn out to be someone else’s daughter in disguise; someone would die of something that didn’t prevent them from singing about it for several minutes; and the plot would be resolved by some coincidences which, in real life, would be as likely as a cardboard hammer.

---from Maskerade by Terry Pratchett.

Prepare ye the way of the Lord…

As part of helping Oliver Mannion prepare for his Confirmation this spring, I had to pretend to be a good Catholic this morning and go to church.  In his sermon, the priest, taking his text from Luke 9:28-36, said something that startled me.

“Jesus came to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth.”

I almost stood up to object.

Jesus came to do what?

Excuse me?  How does that fit with this?

“My kingdom is not of this world.”

Seems to me there’s a contradiction here.  The idea that Jesus came to establish God’s kingdom on earth sounds like something Rapturists believe.  If I remember correctly, we Catholics treat the Book of Revelations as exactly what it is, an interesting dream narrative written by a stoned-out old man who’d spent too much time alone on an island experimenting with the juices of the local flora.

If I could talk to priests without my blood boiling, I’d have asked him to reconcile what he said with what Jesus said.  Since I can’t, and I didn’t, I’m asking you folks.  Anyone want to take a stab at explaining how what the priest said doesn’t mark him as a secret reader of the Left Behind novels?

An insomniac’s aubade

I can remember when being awake at three-thirty on a Saturday morning meant I was still having a great time on a Friday night.

“Buffalo Bill! The thrill of my life to have invented you!”

When I was a kid one of my favorite places to go was a theme park up near Lake George called Storytown USA.  It was the nearest thing we had to a local Disneyland, scaled way down of course, with rides and attractions based on fairy tales, fables, tall tales, legends, and, without their ever being actually named, TV shows and movies.

It was a modest place, but not chintzy.  What was there was done well, presented with pride and some dash, and clean, shiny, colorful, and fun.  But my favorite part was also the best part, Ghost Town!

Ghost Town was essentially the set of a TV western with probably as many “buildings” that were just false fronts.  But there were plenty of buildings you could go into, like the livery stable, the blacksmith’s, the saloon, the general store, and the jail, enough places to visit that you could feel as though you were wandering the wooden plank sidewalks of real town in the Old West.  It helped that several times a day masked bandits would ride into town and hold up the bank.  A posse, rounded up from the kids on hand, would help the law track down and capture one of the robbers.  Then members of his gang would sneak back into town and there’d be a jail break followed by a shoot out with the good guys that would include, depending on the bravery or recklessness of the college kids playing the bandits that summer, at least one bandit getting shot off the roof of the hotel.

In between the robberies and the gunfights there’d be shows on an outdoor stage built out from the side of the saloon.  The shows would feature “cowgirls” who did rope tricks, “cowboys” who played the guitar and sang, “scouts” who had knife throwing acts, and saloon girls who danced the can-can lifting their skirts high for the bored dads in the audience.  Frankly, I could never imagine getting so old that I would be bored by gunfights, rope tricks, and knife throwing acts that I would think it was a treat when those acts were interrupted by girls who couldn’t do rope tricks or throw knives.

I still haven’t gotten that old.

All of this was presided over by the town marshal, Wild Windy Bill McKay, who was a quick-draw artist and singing cowboy as well as a daring and resourceful upholder of law and order on the violent frontier.

Now, it was obvious to the most gullible kid that Windy Bill wasn’t a real cowboy.  No real cowboy had stars on his boots or wore red jeans and fringed shirts with multi-colored sleeves, except Roy Rogers when he wasn’t working around the ranch.

But even though we knew the truth we accepted it as fact that he spent his days doing exactly what we were watching and helping him do, chase bandits and shoot it out with bad guys.  Ghost Town, to our minds, was more dangerous than Dodge City, Tombstone, and Deadwood combined, and it would be a hundred times worse if it wasn’t for Windy Bill.

For all we knew and I still know Bill McKay had majored in accounting in college or spent years before coming to work at Storytown selling shoes.

But he presented himself as an authentic Western hero and legend and seemed confident that we wouldn’t doubt it and, son of a gun, we didn’t.

To us---to me anyway---for the time we moseyed the dusty streets of Ghost Town, Marshall Wild Windy Bill McKay was as real a lawman as Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickcock.

The irony being, of course, that the Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill we knew and admired weren’t any more authentic than Wild Windy Bill McKay. 

All three of them were creations of a hundred years worth of work by dime novelists, playwrights, movie makers, producers of TV shows, and one William F. Cody.

Buffalo Bill.

What went on in Ghost Town borrowed heavily from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, as in fact did every movie and TV western that came after him.  We “know” what an Indian attack and the cavalry riding to the rescue look like because of Buffalo Bill.  We “know” what a stage coach hold-up looks like because of Buffalo Bill.  We “know” what Custer’s Last Stand looked like because of Buffalo Bill.  We know what an authentic Western hero looks like and how he acts because of Buffalo Bill, and by the way even when he’s short and sporting a crew cut and spits tobacco sideways out of the corner of his mouth he still looks and acts like Buffalo Bill, tall, handsome, noble in bearing and in action and in thought.  No matter how far the anti-hero of a revisionist western departs from the image, the image is always with him.  It’s the shadow he casts except when he becomes the shadow cast by the image.

Buffalo Bill didn’t invent the tropes and cliches of the Western but he codified them, clarified them, and set the standards for their presentation.  He didn’t personally rewrite the history of the settlement of the American frontier to turn it into the set of self-congratulatory heroic legends and lies that stood in the place of truth in our collective memory for over a century.  But his revision of the rewrite brought it all together and because his shows were so “real” and so popular and so widely imitated his story of the Wild West became and has remained the most deeply believed, even by movie directors in the process of debunking it.

We may know it’s not true but we want it to be and the most cynical and revisionist Westerns still express that wish.  Nobody can resist the charm and the will of Buffalo Bill.

This isn’t exactly the theme of Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians.  It’s more like the given.

For one thing, this theme, for it to be a theme, must include the fact of the audience’s complicity.  Wild Windy Bill McKay’s existence depended on our willingness to believe in it and our ability to convince ourselves that we did believe it.  There’s no audience complicity in Altman’s film because as far as the script and the camera bother to notice there is no audience. 

I mean an audience watching the performances by the members of Buffalo Bill’s troupe depicted in the movie.  But the same can be said of the audience watching the movie.  Altman, never one to play to his audience’s expectations, seems to have gone out of his way to ignore his audience entirely on this one.  He makes no attempt to draw us in, either into the story itself or into the Wild West show.  We don’t get to feel what it might have been like to watch these spectacles live.   He seems to take it for granted that because we’ve seen all these tricks and stunts a thousand times before we don’t care if we see them again.

Without the audience’s complicity in rewriting history to the point of erasing it and replacing it with myths, legends, and self-serving lies, there’s no real criticism of the process by which a people hide who they really are from themselves.

Which is fine, as long as you understand that Altman didn’t intend to make a movie that was about that.

He didn’t make a revisionist western.  He’d already made one of those.  McCabe and Mrs Miller.  Buffalo Bill and the Indians depends on our having seen that one and others like Little Big Man, Doc, The Wild Bunch, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and note who starred in the last two.

But Buffalo Bill and the Indians is still about watching a performance.  It’s just that it’s about a single person watching a single person perform with the watcher and the watched being the same single person.  Buffalo Bill and the Indians is about Buffalo Bill watching himself being Buffalo Bill.

It’s about a man who has done things that ought to have made him legendary making his living off being not a legend but a fiction.  The Buffalo Bill who’s the star of the show, the reason people come to see the Wild West, has nothing in common with the young scout who earned the nickname Buffalo Bill.  Bill Cody knows he’s had real adventures that should be famous.  But his fortune, his show, his company of cowboys, Indians, trick shot artists, and their families and support staff depend on people paying money to see the phony Buffalo Bill, the one invented to sell dime novels and now tickets.  This is not somebody Bill Cody knows or even truly believes exists.  It’s no wonder then he’s never sure how to be this Buffalo Bill.  He’s always performing, constantly making it up, and it’s not easy.  He loses track of the plot.  He forgets his lines.  He continually finds himself in situations where there’s no way for him to know how “Buffalo Bill” should act or what “he” should say.  And he’s not smart enough or quick enough or cynical enough for the job.

Rather than try to keep it all straight in his head, he’s decided it’s easier to just give in and believe he is who he’s pretending to be.  He’s found that it helps if he never thinks about it and to that end he spends a lot of his time not thinking.

What we have then is the spectacle of one of the most grounded of movie stars playing a man floating through life on his own hot air.  One of the most self-skeptical of movie stars playing a pompous, self-infatuated windbag.  One of the smartest actors going playing someone who has made himself willfully dumb.  One of the coolest of leading men playing a buffoon.

Paul Newman’s performance as Buffalo Bill is a whole lot of fun to watch.

It’s also kind of sad, and I’m not sure all that sadness sticks only to the character.

But that’s something we can work out in the discussion, which is underway…now.

Friday morning update:  Thanks to Michael, Phil, and Bill for making last night’s discussion great.  Comment threads on these posts stay open so feel free to chip in anytime.

Next week’s a double-feature, Secret Honor and Streamers, but we’ll be focusing on how filming plays changed Altman’s style going into the 1990s.

And, remember, in two weeks we’ll be doing Popeye, but instead of a formal discussion I’ll be leading the live-blogging.  We’ll start the fun earlier that night, at 9 PM Eastern.  Mark your calendar and update your Netflix queue.

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

Bobby and Matt

First thought on hearing Matt Damon might be playing Robert Kennedy in an upcoming movie:  We won’t be able to see Bobby for the movie star.

Second thought: Although…he did a terrific job in The Informant! of making you forget you were looking at Matt Damon the movie star.  He became that schlubby dope.

Third thought.  That’s true.  Except…that half the fun of watching The Informant! was suddenly remembering you were watching Matt Damon and saying to yourself, “Wow!  I can’t believe that’s Matt Damon!”  Then for a while the movie would be about watching Matt Damon the movie star not being Matt Damon the movie star.  So, in a way, you were always seeing the movie star instead of the character.

Fourth thought:  I guess so.  But how about  The Good Shepherd?  He was a very unmovie star gray in The Good Shepherd.  And don’t forget The Departed.  He was better than DiCaprio in The Departed at disappearing into his character and DiCaprio did a pretty good job himself of not being a movie star.

Fifth Thought:  Well, ok.  He might pull it off.  As long as he doesn’t try to use the same accent he used in The Depaaaahtid.

Sixth Thought:  And as long as they don’t cast Ben Affleck as Jack.

It could work.  Damon is more of a chameleon than stars as handsome as he is usually allow themselves to be.  He’s chosen his roles carefully so that he’s kept busy and kept up his reputation without solidifying a particular image of himself in the public’s mind, unless it’s as Jason Bourne, which has given him something to play off of in his other roles.  Even as Jason Bourne he’s is less Matt Damon the movie star than Clive Owen’s Clive Owen in The International, Shoot ‘Em Up, or Duplicity  or his Departed co-star Mark Wahlberg’s Mark Wahlberg in Max Payne and Shooter.  Avoiding goofy romantic comedies has also helped. 

If he does do the movie, he won’t be Bobby Kennedy the way Meryl Streep was Julia Child, but he won’t be Bobby Kennedy the way Gary Cooper was Lou Gehrig either, not that emulating the former would guarantee a great movie or that following the example of the latter would make for a lesser one.  Which would you rather see, a movie like Julie & Julia or one like Pride of the Yankees?

As important as Damon’s performance will be how the director and screenwriter approach the script and whether they decide to try to tell the whole story of Robert Kennedy from the baptismal font at St Aidan’s in Brookline to the hillside at Arlington or narrow the focus to a  single crucial period in Kennedy’s life.  The movie’s is being adapted from the biography by Evan Thomas, which I liked but its most original contribution to an understanding of who Bobby Kennedy was and what made him tick is in the chapters devoted to his teenage years.   As Thomas portrays him, the young Bobby was shy, insecure, religious, and devoted to his mother, all of which made him something of the odd Kennedy out among his brothers, including his baby brother Teddy.  But Jack spotted something in him and, while the eight year difference in their ages prevented them from being pals, Jack kept a closer, more watchful, and more admiring eye on Bobby than either their brother Joe or their father did.  That would be an interesting family dynamic to watch play out but of course Damon’s far too old for a college-aged Bobby.  So I expect flashbacks, but I hope that the script doesn’t try to cover more ground than the years between November 22, 1963 and June 5, 1968.

__________________

Related Mannion re-runs:  The Informant! came out on DVD Tuesday.  I saw it in the theater last fall and reviewed it here in a post called Not going to inform on The Informant!

I didn’t review The Good Shepherd but I did post my Notes for a review that never did get written.

Programming note: Buffalo Bill and the Indians

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, come one and come all, to the most amazing, the most exciting, the most thrill-packed and heart-pounding discussion of Robert Altman’s historically accurate, factually true, culturally authentic depiction of the story of the story of the story of the taming of the American Wild West by the man who did the most to tame it and lived to tell the tale thousands and thousands and thousands of times in arenas and under tents in every state of the Union and in countries around the World, Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson!

You heard correctly, folks.  All the fun, all the glory, all the blood-curdling adventure of the First Annual I Hate Robert Altman Virtual Film Festival continues tomorrow night, Thursday, February 25, at 10 PM Eastern time.

This time you have no excuses, because you can watch Buffalo Bill and the Indians right now, the entire movie, for free, on YouTube!

Here’s the New York Times overview.

We interrupt this blog so that the blogger can have a nervous breakdown over his latest home improvement project

I would like to get through a week, just one week, without having to make the kind of decision about home improvement/auto repair that I am not smart enough to make and which when I do make it leaves me feeling like an incompetent boob and a born sucker.

Let me give you a tip nobody gave me when we were buying this house.

If the house you’re considering buying has a shiny and new looking bathroom and one of the things that makes it look so shiny and new is a bath tub liner, immediately demand that the sellers knock two or three grand off their asking price.

This is why.  At some point after you’ve taken possession of the house that liner is going to pull away from the wall a tiny bit and develop a leak.  Water will seep in between it and the side of the tub and become trapped underneath.  Stepping on that trapped water will feel like stepping onto a water bed but more to the point it will cause the tub liner to deform and pull farther away from the wall so that more water gets trapped underneath while water also now starts getting on the other side of the old tub and onto the floor underneath---the puddles forming directly below in your basement will tell you when this has begun to happen.

This is a common problem with no common or easy fix.

You might---might---be able to remove the drain, slip the nozzle of your shop vac in there and vaccum the water out.  But you risk cracking the drain shoe which you can’t replace without taking out the whole tub.  Your only other option is to rip out the liner, and when you do that you will find that the reason the former owners installed the liner is that they didn’t want to pay to replace or reglaze the old scratched, rusted, cracked, or otherwise damaged bathtub.

And that old liner cannot be put back after you’ve drained the trapped water.  Ripping it out requires ripping it up.  You need to special order a new liner which takes over a week to arrive and install, at a cost of upwards of a grand.

If you’re lucky you’ll discover that the old tub only needs reglazing, which you can get done for around 500 bucks, but your tub will be out of commission for several days, and if you only have the one bathroom…

The quickest solution is to just assume the worse and call in the remodellers to put in a new tub.  They can do that in a day but you’re probably looking at spending between two and three grand.

Which you’d feel better about spending if you knew you’d actually put that money aside when you talked the former owners down on their asking price.

I’m just relating what I’ve learned from some Googling and from spending the last couple of hours calling plumbers and local handymen to ask about getting the problem fix.

Now, I already feel like an incompetent boob because I did not catch the problem in time.  But I expect to more incompetent and boobish in the days to come because no matter what decision I make it will seem like the wrong one, even if I decide to have the liner taken out to see what horror lies beneath and strike lucky and discover that all that needs to be done is to have the tub reglazed.  I won’t feel competent or smart, because now we’ll have to go several days without a useable shower and bath, but I won’t feel quite as big an incompetent as I expect I will feel if I just take the easy route and call in the remodelers who will tell me after they’ve removed the old tub that it wasn’t really in all that bad a shape.

I’m praying that that the next phone call I make will be to a home repair genius who will say, “Oh that’s an easy fix.  I know just how to do it.  Take me a couple of hours.  Boom boom done.  Two hundred bucks.”

Ha!

You’ll notice I’ve already ruled out putting in a new liner, a decision I’m already regretting.

At any rate, I have to go make my calls, after which I’ll collapse in a heap of despair and self-reproach, so that post you’re all waiting for me to write on the mythological inconsistencies in the portrayal of Athena’s daughter in Percy Jackson and the Olympians will have to wait till later.  Sorry about that.

The Mannionville Week in Review

Trying out a new feature here, a Monday morning wrap-up of my posts from the past week days or so.

Starting with last Saturday, February 13, we had a report of a visit by the Grim Squeaker and a possible miscarriage of justice involving the execution of an unwanted rodent intruder in our house.

Also a short video lecture by graphic designer Milton Glaser on the connection between drawing and thinking.

Sunday brought an interview with Discworld creator Terry Pratchett.

Monday was quiet but Tuesday we had news from the 2010 Westminster Dog Show and then a rant about how pirates, sociopaths, and pyschopaths have taken over the economy.

Wednesday we said so-long and farewell and enough already to retiring Indiana Senator Evan “Nobody Likes Me Anymore” Bayh.

On Thursday morning I noted novelist Don DeLillo’s cinematographer’s eye at work in his new novel Point Omega.  And Thursday night the First Virtual I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival continued with a discussion of The Player including comments by our favorite film blogger, The Self-Styled Siren.

Friday we received a post card from Hawaii from Uncle Merlin, who can’t understand why everybody hates him.

Saturday, reading a quote from a book by a novelist I met when I was in grad school reminded me of Writers I have known and loathed.

And yesterday, Sunday, I lamented that going to the movies has become much less of a pleasure for me these days and more of an exercise in worrywart-ism.

There you have it.  Busier work around here than I remembered.  Thanks for joining in.  I hope you’ll go back and check out any posts you might have missed and add to any of the comment threads.

Now on to this week…

Cinephobia

Ok, this is not a good development.

Went to the movies this afternoon with the family and realized just as the lights began to dim and the first trailer rolled that I already couldn’t wait for the movie to be over.

And that this is not a new feeling.

I don’t like going to the movies anymore because I can’t concentrate on them.  Not because of any lapses of movie-going etiquette among the people around me.  And I don’t think it’s because the movies we see are bad or dull.  Some are, some aren’t.

The problem is that as soon as I sit down in the theater I begin to worry.  About anything and everything.  I worry all the way through the film and my worrying affects how I see the movie.

Whatever movie I see turns out to be about whatever it is I’m worrying about.  I’ve watched Oscar-nominated movies about car repair, comedies about broken plumbing, thrillers about finding and affording a good orthodontist.

I can’t tell you how many movies there are about what a rotten job of being a father I’m doing.

How do they all know about me out in Hollywood?

This doesn’t happen when I watch movies on DVD at home.

We watched Night at the Opera Friday night and that was all about sanity clauses, crowded staterooms, beds disappearing from hotel rooms, and Margaret Dumont missing the jokes once again.  Not once did the Marx Brothers bring up my failures as a parent or mention the leak in my basement.

But I have noticed that I don’t even bother to try to watch movies late at night anymore.

Going to the movies used to provide an escape.  Now it’s like walking into the confessional or racing back into the house because you hear the phone ringing, getting there too late, and seeing your doctor’s or your boss’s number on the caller ID and then sitting there for two hours trying to guess why they called.

Anybody else having this problem?  Anybody got a guess what’s causing it?

_________________

Speaking of movie theater etiquette, Ken Levine has listed a few things that other people do that make his movie-going experience less enjoyable or as he puts it things that PISS HIM OFF!

Writers I have known and loathed

Adapted from my Twitter feed.  Saturday.  February 13, 2010.

Blogger I admire posted a quote from a novel.

That was it, the whole post, just the quote.  No big deal.  I do that myself. post quotes from books, poems, without comment, just because I think they’re meaningful and well-written.

Passage must have struck her as meaningful and well-written.

Struck me as fatuous, self-important, self-congratulatory, sentimental and cynical in its sentimentality, and, more to the point, just the sort of thing that asshole would write.

That asshole being the novelist not the blogger.

See, I met him.

Clearly didn’t like him.

He came to Iowa to read when he was young and I was younger and in grad school there.

At the time he’d published two collections of short stories I’d liked a whole lot and an autobiographical novel that hadn’t wowed me like the stories.

Novel required readers to like and admire the protagonist far more than he deserved to be liked and admired.

Plus, it was too obviously and heavily influenced by The Adventures of Augie March.  I’ve long since learned to sympathize with writers who can’t match the great writers that have inspired them, but at the time I was a hard-case and I tended to think things like, If you can’t write as well as Bellow then don’t go out of your way to draw comparisons between yourself and Bellow.

I wasn’t a complete prig though.

The stories were excellent and I was inclined to think of the novel as a product of his youth and the stories as indicators of the great writer he would become.

The writer went out of his way to prove me wrong by being exactly like the protagonist of his novel.  Self-congratulatory, self-obsessed, self-important, and nowhere near as bright as he thought he was and expected us to think he was.

Just as with the main character of his novel, he required us to like and admire him far more than he deserved.

And the reasons he was confident that we would like and admire him didn’t seem to have anything to do with the reason we’d packed the auditorium to hear him read---his talent as a writer and the excellence of his stories.

Pompous, self-congratulatory, fatuous, full of it, but his self-admiration wasn’t connected to his talent.

It wasn't as a writer he expected us to think as highly of him as he thought of himself. It was as a man of the world. He was "smart," knew how all the games were played.

Writing, literature--games he'd mastered.  Proof of that wasn't his good reviews. It was his big advances.  Six figures for next book.

Plus, he was "funny." All his jokes cynical or insults. Actually made fun of handicapped. Serious jerk.

Takes a lot of guts to stand in front of a crowd of young aspiring writers who've come to hear you read your fiction and spend the time bragging how you’re so much smarter, savvier, and successful than they are or can ever hope to be.

Was never able to read his fiction after that without annoyance.  Finally gave up on him.

Probably unfair of me.  Lots of great writers have been serious jerks.  Doesn't affect my appreciation for their work.  But I never met them.

Their serious jerkiness is an abstraction. Almost another fiction. The biographical Dostoevsky as much a character as Prince Myshkin.

Maybe you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned the writer’s name.

It’s like this.  He was young and flush with success.  He might have matured, learned some humility.  I have reason to think he hasn’t, that he’s grown more pompous, more self-congratulatory, more fatuous.  But I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him again.   And whatever he is or was, I don’t want my impression of him to ruin his writing for anybody, particularly that blogger.

But really his name doesn’t matter because who he is doesn’t matter as much as what he was, a famous author who turned out to be a disappointing asshole.  The history of literature is full of those.  A similar story could be told about any number of writers.

The details change but the moral remains the same:  Avoid meeting writers whose work you admire.

In fact, I have a similar story from that very same year, about a famous poet who came to speak to a class I was in.  Might not have been as big a jerk as he came across as.

He might’ve just been drunk.

_________________

Reminds me.  I’ve been looking for an opportunity to link to this post by Kit Stolz, written last May around the time Blake Bailey's biography of John Cheever came out and inspired a lot of people, including me, to hold forth on what a colossal asshole Cheever could be.  Kit felt we were giving Cheever a bum deal, considering all the even more colossal literary assholes whose colossal assholery seems to get easily excused, forgiven, overlooked, or explained away.

Read Kit’s post, Misreading (and Misunderstanding) Cheever.

Why everybody hates Uncle Merlin these days, even the clerks at my local convenience store

Because he’s been on Maui the last week and a half and he can’t resist telling everybody back east about it and sending along pictures like this.

The other night I was out on a milk run at the local convenience store when my cell rang.  Normally I don’t answer when I’m in the middle of conversations in the analog world, but I knew what was coming and I wanted some moral support.  “It’s my friend calling to tell me what a wonderful time he’s having in Hawaii,” I told the clerks, then I held up the phone for them to yell at it, which they did.  “We hate you!” they said together.

Didn’t stop him.  He told us what a great time he’s having anyway.  As the blonde’s told him, “Pipe down, Hawaii boy!”

“You know, I had a premonition you’d show up.”

Family movie night tonight.

Looks like you can watch with us.  All of Night at the Opera is online at YouTube.  Start here.

A cynical satirical thriller with a heart

Movie Producer Griffin Mill (played by Tim Robbins): So what’s your pitch?

Screenwriter (screenwriter and director Alan Rudolph playing a character named Alan Rudolph): Does political scare you?

Mill: Political doesn’t scare me.  Radical political scares me.  Political political scares me.

Screenwriter:  This is politely politically radical.

Mill:  Is it funny?

Screenwriter: It’s funny.

Mill:  It’s a funny political thing.

Screenwriter:  It’s funny.  It’s a thriller too.

Mill:  So what’s the story?

Screenwriter:  Well, I want Bruce Willis.  I think I can talk to him.  It’s a story about a senator, a bad guy senator, at first---

Mill:  I see, so it’s sort of a cynical political thriller comedy.

Screenwriter:  Yeah, but it’s got a heart.  In the right spot.  Anyway, he has an accident.

Mill:  An accident?

Screenwriter: Yeah.  And he becomes clairvoyant.  Like a psychic.

Mill: Oh!  I see! It’s kind of a psychic political comedy.  With a heart.

Screenwriter:  With a heart.

---From The Player, directed by Robert Altman, adapted from Michael Tolkin's novel .

Robert Altman:  I put Cynthia Stevenson in the hot but with Tim because she’s not the girl Hollywood usually asks to take her shirt off.  When he saw the movie, Paul Newman told me, I get it.  You don’t get to see the tits you want to see.  You see the ones you don’t want to see”…

Paul Newman:  There was a more important point in that movie, I thought.  Tim Robbins’ character was talking to this young woman on a cell phone and he was watching her while he was talking to her and moving in closer.  It was just the most frightening scene in the world, to realize that you could be observed in your most private place.  And of course it raises the specter of all those questions of privacy which are now becoming paramount and the technology we have today.  Just a little hint.  Yeah, it certainly wasn’t about nudity, it was about how accessible everybody is.  It’s spooky.

---from the chapter on The Player in Robert Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff.

My father was watching a movie on television late one night.  He’d come across it while channel-surfing and had missed the opening credits.  It was a weird movie, full of characters talking at cross-purposes and moving around a lot without actually seeming to say or do anything that moved the story along.  In fact, there seemed to be no story.  My father was baffled for a while, but then there came a shot of a character interacting with the reflection of another character in a window pane.  “Oh,” my father said to himself in an ah-ha moment of realization, “It’s a Robert Altman movie.”

It was A Wedding, and by that point in his career when he directed that one, 1978, shooting characters through windows and reflected in windows and in mirrors had become Altman’s signature.  He’d made a whole movie about reflections.  In a movie a reflection is as real and solid as the actual image the faces and bodies reflected, because the opposite is true, the images are as transient and ephemeral and insubstantial as the reflections.  Both are just tricks of light.  Which is not a profound observation and not the point anyway. 

The point is that what we’re looking at matters because we’re looking at it.  What we see is defined by how we see it.  Also not a profound observation, but it’s a trenchant lesson for anyone who wants to make movies.

Movies of course are meant to be looked at, but they’re often not made to be looked at closely.  What’s put up on the screen is there to distract the eye, not draw it in.  We’re not meant to notice that what we’re looking at usually isn’t worth taking the trouble to watch because we’ve watched it a hundred times before in umpteen numbers of movies and TV shows.

The scene in Newman was talking about in The Player is as spooky and foreboding as he says, although I was more frightened on Tim Robbins’ character’s behalf because even though he’s the spy and Greta Scacchi plays the spied upon, the one whose privacy is being violated, Robbins is the one taking the risk of being caught, that is, exposed.

But the scene is constructed from dozens of beautiful images.  The room Scacchi’s character, a painter and collage artist, is working in glows with the soft, watery blueness of her paintings and that blue is deepened and warmed where it reflects in the window panes.  It’s pretty, but it’s importance isn’t revealed until a few scenes later when the effect is re-created in a movie Robbins and his fellow movie studio types are watching or, really, not watching but sort of looking at as they focus on the business of getting this movie and a bunch of others made.  They don’t want to have to watch and it’s a point in the movie’s favor that they don’t have to watch it to know what’s going on.

Neither do we.

It’s a scene from a movie that’s instantly recognizable as yet another version of the kind of hard-boiled detective movie Hollywood cranks out the way McDonald’s does cheeseburgers with the same relation to the art of storytelling as those cheeseburgers have to the art of cooking.  We can tell ourselves the whole movie from the three lines of dialog we’re given.  The only thing about this scene that distinguishes it from any number of scenes like it in any number of other movies is that the two characters are played by Scott Glenn and Lily Tomlin and the prettiness of the lighting doesn’t change the fact that they are delivering performances that are as cliched as the seedy hotel room whose glowing blue window we’re looking at them through.

In this kind of movie thriller movie stars have the same function as pretty or tricky cinematography, to give the audience some reason to think they’re seeing something new and different.

Altman’s whole career was devoted to giving the audience something actually different to see.

And, just to be cheeky, he followed that scene from a “fake” movie with a scene of his own that begins with a shot of Tim Robbins seen from a long way off through the glass doors of a hotel lobby.

And we’re back to Newman’s point about our vulnerability to the gaze of strangers’, as good as any starting place for tonight’s discussion, although feel free to start any place you want.

Extra butter on the popcorn for whoever ties any of this in with my post from this morning about Don DeLillo as a movie maker.

Friday morning:  Called it a night around 11:30, but the comment thread’s still open and discussion’s ongoing.  Feel free to add your thoughts to this thread or the ones on California Split and Thieves Like Us anytime.

Next week’s feature:  Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson.

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Don DeLillo at work behind the camera in the mind

Don DeLillo writes books that are movies.

Plenty of novelists write books that are screenplays, particularly hack mystery and thriller writers.  A smart director could turn one of their novels into a decent movie working straight from the paperback.  They don’t tell their stories as much as let them play out.  Their books are mostly dialog interrupted by perfunctory narrative passages that don’t do much more than tell you what if this was a movie the camera would be pointed at and what the actors would be doing---in other words, stage directions.

DeLillo doesn’t tell readers what they would see.  He doesn’t even tell them what he sees.  He makes them see and see it like a camera.  He moves the mind’s eye around in sweeps and zooms and short cuts and fades.  All great novelists work in pictures.  But some are painters, some are photographers, and some, like Dickens, like DeLillo are cinematographers.  DeLillo’s pictures move and very often the movement is not from action within the scene but from the passing of DeLillo’s camera over it.  Think of the opening of Underworld and the unloading scene in White Noise .  In both scenes the “actors” are practically standing still, frozen by the shock of the ball coming off Bobby Thomson’s bat, stuck in a long line of stopped cars going nowhere.  And yet both scenes are alive with a sense of imperative motion provided by DeLillo’s pushing of the camera in the reader’s mind.

You could look at this as a commentary on the nature of film and the illusion of motion and objectivity, a critical reminder that when we watch a movie we see only what the director lets us see, and write a paper on it.

Or you could, if you’re DeLillo, write it up as a chapter in a novella in which you explicate the idea by demonstrating it.

In the first chapter of his new book, Point Omega, a man wanders into the Museum of Modern Art, plants himself against a wall, and from there watches a video installation in which Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is shown, slowed way down so that it takes a whole day to run from beginning to end.

DeLillo puts multiple cameras to work on this one.  In fact, instead of a single movie, he presents us with several at once, like a video installation, and we are free to move around and decide which movie to watch or rather which movie we are watching at any given moment.

We watch the man in the scene.  We watch the video installation.  We watch him watching the video installation.  We watch what he’s watching around the installation as other museum-goers enter, cross the screen, and exit from view.

We watch Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates watch Janet Leigh undress for her fatal shower.

We watch the man watching himself watch Norman Bates watch Janet Leigh.

And if our imaginations aren’t kept busy enough, as a bonus, and we’ve seen it before and our memories cooperate, we get to watch Psycho, but two versions of it, Hitchcock’s and Hitchcock’s re-edited and pared down to its essentials by DeLillo with DeLillo’s commentary.

I’m making this sound very meta and it is, but it doesn’t read that way.  It reads as a scene in movie.  So we’re watching that along with everything else, DeLillo’s movie about a man watching a movie in a museum.

The video installation in the novella, by the way, is based on a real one, 24 Hour Psycho by Douglas Gordon.

At any rate, DeLillo has this new novella, Point Omega, and the Barnes & Noble Review has this interview with DeLillo.

And, of course, I’m not about to miss a chance to post this:

Programming note: The Player

Tomorrow night’s featured discussion for the First Virtual I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival is The Player, Altman’s seriocomic tale of love, lust, murder, and box office grosses.  Please join us at 10 PM Eastern Thursday.  Bring your own popcorn, we’ll provide the alibi.

Here’s the New York Times overview.

Here’s Ebert’s review.

And here’s the movie’s famous eight-minute single-shot opening sequence.

The whole film is available to watch online at Amazon.

Poor, poor pitiful him

Washington Establishmentarians in the National Press Corps define a moderate Democrat as one who is willing to work with Republicans to kill Democratic initiatives.

A moderate Republican is one who smiles when he calls Democrats cowards, traitors, and socialists.

By these definitions, Evan Bayh is a moderate.

There are eleven, count them, eleven incumbent Senators who won’t be running for re-election this fall.  This AP story leads off with the implication that they’re all moderates, exasperated and worn-out by their noble efforts to bring about bi-partisan solutions to the major problems facing the nation being thwarted by the rabid fringe elements in the Senate---with the further implication, of course, that these rabid fringe elements are mainly Democrats.  Right Wing Republican nuts like Inhofe, DeMint, Bunning, Coburn, and Shelby are a quiet, unassuming lot, who generally keep to themselves, unlike that wild man, Bernie Sanders, who frightens all and sundry with his rabid fringe elementary ways.

In fact, the article mentions very few of the soon to be ex-senators by name, but two who do get named are Chris Dodd and Judd Gregg.  Now Dodd is in fact a moderate, but like all the true moderates in the Democratic caucus he is thought of as a liberal by the establishment types, including the ones in his own party.  And Gregg is a loud and proud conservative.

I don’t know why Gregg isn’t running again.  But his decision to get out of the Senate was made a long time ago.  He’d have been gone early last year, in fact, having accepted President Obama’s offer to make him Secretary of Commerce.  He changed his mind in a snit, apparently deciding he’d be happier spending his last two years in the Senate joining his fellow Republicans in gleeful unanimous obstructionism, not even bothering to try to meet the Establishment’s definition of a moderate Republican by smiling when he insults and taunts the President.

Dodd is a cancer survivor who was facing a desperate race for re-election for reasons that had little to do with ideology.  His decision not to run again was personal, practical, and unlike Evan Bayh’s calculated to help the Democratic Party.  It’s now more likely that Connecticut will continue to have one real Democratic Senator and that Senator won’t be a “moderate,” which is fine with Chris Dodd.

Here’s a list of the other retiring Senators, only one of whom gets named in the AP story:

Byron Dorgan (N.D.), Ted Kaufman (Del.) and Roland Burris (Ill.), Kit Bond (Mo.), George Lemieux (Fla.), George Voinovich (Ohio), Sam Brownback (Kans.) and Jim Bunning (Ky.)

Dorgan, Kaufman, and Burris are Democrats.  The other five are Republicans.

Kaufman and Burris are interim appointments.  Kaufman has been filling Joe Biden’s seat and Burris Barack Obama’s.  I don’t believe Kaufman ever had any plans to run and in fact I think he was appointed with the understanding that he wouldn’t.   Burris, who is not a moderate anyway, was appointed by the corrupt and disgraced ex-governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich as a poke in the eye to Barack Obama and the Illinois State Legislator and he has never been able to live that down.  His not running has nothing to do with fringe elements in the party and everything to do with his being seen as a joke.

Dorgan’s announcement came after he took a surprise tumble in polls of North Dakota voters who have apparently decided they’d rather be represented by a real Republican rather than by a “moderate” Democrat who all too often votes like a Republican.  It’s hard to see how this can be blamed on fringe elements in the Democratic Party unless the voters in North Dakota are thinking, “Too bad about the way old Byron’s letting himself get pushed around by all those socialists.  I guess the only way we’ll have a moderate Democrat representing us from now on is by electing a Right Wing Republican.”

As for the Republicans, Bunning and Brownback are not by any stretch moderates, while Voinovich, who once upon a time did have some credentials as if not a true moderate than as less than an ideologically rigid conservative, but he’s been held to the Republican Party’s strict obstructionist line as ruthlessly every other member of the caucus.

Meanwhile, down in Florida, for a while it looked as though Lemieux would be replaced by Charlie Crist, who like Voinovich is less than an ideological conservative, but now he’s on his way to losing the Republican primary to the very conservative Marco Rubio and in desperation Crist has taken to accusing Rubio of not being conservative enough.

AP’s article includes some quotes from one of the true moderate Republicans who’ve served in the Senate in the last decade, the former Republican Arlen Specter, who was driven from the Party by the conservatives who run the show and who very well may lose his bid for re-election to Right Wing Republican Pat Toomey.

John McCain gets a mention as someone facing a tough re-election fight, but it’s not mentioned that it’s because of a serious primary challenge from his right.

Getting down to it, then, the AP story contains no evidence that any moderates are being driven from Congress by polarizing elements within their own party.  An objective look at what’s actually going on in Congress reveals no evidence that any moderate Democrats, however you define them, are retiring or even in facing election-time trouble because of pressures from the left to conform ideologically.  All of that is happening among Republicans where even conservatives, let alone “moderates” are being pushed farther and farther to the Right.

The article is another routine example of the sort of Insider Journalism whose first rule is that no matter what the issue and no matter what is actually happening no explicit blame can be place upon Republicans without placing equal or more blame upon Democrats, preferably more.  Both parties must be at fault or nobody is, in which case it’s just one of those things, you know?

Beyond that, however, the article is premised upon the reporters’ accepting Evan Bayh’s stated reasons for retiring at face value.

There is no parade of “moderates” marching out of Congress in a mixture of sadness and frustration at the polarization of there.  What there is is Evan Bayh, one of the three most conservative Democrats in the Senate, who has spent the last year doing everything he can think of to sabotage President Obama, abandoning the people in Indiana who voted for him and would have been glad to vote for him again and leaving them wide open to the possibility that they will be represented in the Senate by another Republican conservative.

If Bayh believes that what the Senate needs is more moderation and bipartisan cooperation, the best way for him to help with that would be to stick around.

Bayh says it’s impossible to get anything done in Washington anymore, but he’s awfully vague about what he himself would like to see get done.  Based on his performance over the last year, it looks as though all he wants to get done is for health care reform to fail.  He’s been in a position to get a lot done.  He just needed to cooperate with President Obama instead of giving aid and comfort to Republican obstructionists.

Bayh is not resigning because he’s tired of the in-fighting.  He may be tired of losing some of those fights.  But the truth of it is that he has started a lot of them himself.

He may be getting out of the Senate in order to position himself for a run for President in 2012 as a “moderate”  and political “outsider” who bears no responsibility for the the failure or the unpopular success of President Obama and liberal Democrats in passing their leftist agenda.

That seems too ridiculous for anyone but a self-deluded, self-serving narcissist to believe.  And Bayh himself has denied he has plans to run…in 2012.

I think it’s more likely that he’s angling to get himself elected governor again and distancing himself from Washington, coming back home to Indiana, would be the smart move.  He may still have Presidential ambitions, but for 2016, when he could then run as an incumbent governor and a Midwestern favorite son.  But I’m just guessing, and wildly at that.

What it really sounds like is that Bayh just got bored.

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It ain’t broken

Little while back I wrote that the way you can tell President Obama is a liberal is that he thinks the system works but it just needs some fixing.

For liberals, the job of governing is a matter of home improvement.  The house needs constant upkeep, but the frame is solid.  Renovate a room here or there, put on an addition, keep the wiring up to date, fix the roof when it starts to leak, and liberals feel they’ve done their job.

Every now and then a disaster hits, and then you have to rebuild.

But liberals think it’s fine to replace the old house with one practically exactly like it, with just maybe a few more safeguards built in.

The object is to protect the people who live comfortably in the house already while making room for more and more people to move in and share in the comfort.

In other words, the liberal ideal is to extend the benefits and opportunities that come from  living in a prosperous capitalistic society to as many people as possible.

The President, his economic advisors, and most of the Democrats in the Senate and plenty in the House sincerely believe the system is broken and they are working to fix it.

The trouble is that the system isn’t broken.

It’s working exactly as it’s designed to.

I have never been able to learn exactly when it happened or what the justification for it was, but sometime ago---longer ago even than when Ronald Reagan became President---the economic model for big business switched from long-term profitability through making and selling stuff to maximizing profits in the short term.

People running corporations stopped thinking things were looking good for the next few years and started panicking over the fact that last quarter’s earnings weren’t significantly higher than the those of the quarter before.

Executives at companies making lots of money began feeling that they were failing because they weren’t making more money.

By they I mean both the companies and the executives themselves, because the executives’ pay had become tied to immediate profits rather than to good long term management.

However this happened and whenever and why, the result was a system set for self-destruct.

There is one tried and true way for a business to increase profits.  Sell more stuff.

But you can’t force people to buy your products or services.

What you can do is persuade them that buying your stuff is a good thing for them.  You can do this by selling the best stuff or at least a better grade of stuff than your competitors.  You can do it by lowering your prices.  You can do it by increasing and improving the services you provide along with the stuff you sell.

All of that might help in the long run.

In the short term, it just costs you money.

So how do you increase profits now without spending any of your money?

The first way is to not spend the money.

The second is to cut back on the money you are forced to spend.

Make an inferior product.  Cut back on what you pay the people who work for you.  Cut back on the number of people who work for you.  Cut back on services to customers.  Raise prices.  Find as many ways as you can to trick customers into giving you more of their money.

Those are moves that will eventually drive away customers, but that will happen in the long run.  So that’s not something you need to worry about right now.

Anyway, there’s a way to get more customers without having to do anything to earn them.

Buy your competitors’ customers off them.

Expand.  Loot your own company, leverage it to the max, to buy out your competitors.  If that’s not enough, and it’s not, because the concept of enough doesn’t exist, only the concept of more, loot your company to buy up any sort of company you can pick up quick, whether or not it makes or sells anything that your company is equipped to make or sell or understand or value the making and selling of.

Along with this new model, either helping to design and refine it or forced upon the people working within it in order for them to function, came a belief in Greed as a virtue.  Corporate types could tell themselves that whatever they did to make more and more money, for the company and for themselves, was a good for all humankind, because through the magic of the market whatever was done in the name of Money would turn out to enrich everyone.  Be as grasping and greedy as you want and people will cheer you as a hero because you made them money.  That you never had to look to see if in fact the money was getting to them wasn’t a problem.  You just took it on faith that it was.  That’s how the Market works.

This blind, self-serving, self-corrupting habit of thought is not congenial to anyone who is honest, well-meaning, responsible, and naturally cautious.

It is congenial to psychopaths and sociopaths.

The system began to self-select for criminals and for people who could by force of will or failure of character turn themselves into criminals.

In a country run by and for pirates, it won’t take long for the meanest, nastiest, most ruthless pirates to rise to the top and take control.

Been there, done that, by the way.  Pretty much the main plot line of human history, but the last time it happened here was in the last four decades of the Nineteenth century and first three of the Twentieth.

Didn’t even work out well for the pirates then.

There is no point in fixing a system like this.

Not unless you want to make the pirates happy.

At any rate, for decades now the system has been working the way the pirates have wanted it to, shoveling more and more money into their treasure chests, taking more and more money out of the wallets of the rest of us, forcing us to keep going by borrowing money from the pirates at rates and on terms that are in fact other acts of piracy.

“Fixing” the system under rules set by pirates isn’t simply dumb, it’s nearly impossible.

As things stand, there is, as Ian Welsh says, just too much that needs doing that the pirates aren’t going to let us collect the money to pay for, even if our politicians can find the will and the courage.

Neither of which they are going to find until they face up the fact that the system isn’t broken.

It’s working just fine.

Ask any pirate.

Tuesday morning Westminster Dog Show blogging

Local favorite, mini-pin Major, has had a fine run at the 2010 Westminster Dog Show, winning best of breed yesterday, for the second year in a row:

Quote of the day from his owner, Howard Schwell: “He just went in there and said, ‘Excuse me, this is my ring. He stuck it to that judge every time.”

Unfortunately:

A tough ending for Callicoon’s Major

Callicoon miniature pinscher Major (Ch. Kimro's Soldier Boy) lost in his bid to win the Toy group tonight at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

Though Major won the mini-pin breed for the second-straight year, he couldn't overcome the likes of the poodle, who won the group.

Photographs, video, and more stories about Major’s quest to be the best from the Times Herald-Record.

If men can fall, why can’t orcs rise?

Two surprises in this BBC interview with Discworld creator Terry Pratchett.

The first is that Pratchett believes that after he’s gone his literary reputation will rest on his novel for young adults, Nation , which strikes me as either special pleading on his part or something pretty close to Arthur Conan Doyle’s conviction that his literary reputation would be based on just about every other sort of book he wrote except the ones that included Sherlock Holmes.

The second surprise---Possible spoiler coming---concerns Mr Nutt, one of the young heroes of Pratchett’s latest Discworld novel, Unseen Academicals .  It’s revealed early on that Mr Nutt is a goblin.  In Discworld, goblins, like trolls, vampires, and werewolves can be either good or bad, heroes or villains---elves, however, are always just plain mean---it’s just that most goblins haven’t had the advantages Mr Nutt has been given by his rich benefactress.  But in the interview Pratchett says that Mr Nutt isn’t your generic sort of goblin.

Mr Nutt is an orc.

Now, while J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t exactly invent orcs, he perfected them, so to speak, and it’s Tolkien’s orcs that were on Pratchett’s mind when he came up with Mr Nutt.  It had always bothered him, Pratchett says, that in The Lord of the Rings, “men can fall but orcs can’t rise.”  So he decided to speculate about what would happen if one orc did in fact rise.

Thanks to reader Kate for the link.