Archive for the Arts & Private Life category
October 1st, 2009
This is one more reason Obama will be lucky to have a second term and live to tell of it.
Personally I agree with the Times. But any hope of getting serious reform passed will founder on this if it’s pushed.
If Obama is LBJ, then Romney taking office in 2013 would be Nixon in 1968, with the mess in Vietnam/Pakghanistan nowhere near settled, the country and the Democratic Party utterly at odds with itself, soldiers shooting college students (see Pittsburgh, directly below), etc.
It’s in the script. Hard to see how Obama can re-write on the fly.
I love him for what he thinks and the spirit he has brought to politics. But more and more I fear that Hillary would have been more effective meat at this moment to feed to this sausage grinder of a Union.
It takes a red-headed woman
To get a dirty job done …
THEN AGAIN … acc to the TImes she supports the Full Speed Ahead Surge in Pakghanistan. Bad. Bad.
So, who knows, maybe we picked the right guy. He’s had an Interesting TIme of it so far.
Now things are going to get rough.
September 30th, 2009
On September 11 (weeks ago), two high-ranking generals came out of retirement to hit Cheney on the head about torture. Interesting but odd.
Their Op Ed was published in The Miami Herald: “Fear was No Excuse to Condone Torture.”
Well and good. But also a bit odd. Is there nothing current behind it? Torture, per se, is no longer an issue. Cheney seems history.
And note that one of the generals — former Marine Commandant Charles Krulak — bears a name that rings in the annals of American postwar history.
In the 1960s (and maybe 50s, under CIA auspices), Marine General Victor “Brute” Krulak was involved in the energetic effort to win in Vietnam. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty worked closely with him, and has written a lot about him.
Relevant bits in a nutshell: Prouty says that Brute, atop the Marine staff in the Pentagon in the early 60s, became a close ally and advisor to JFK in the effort to turn the Vietnam policy around.
The McNamara-Taylor of October 2, 1963 — supposedly the findings of the Secretary of Defense and JFK’s special advisor General Maxwell Taylor on their grand tour of Vietnam — was principally authored by Krulak, Prouty & co, working closely with the White House — and then placed in McNamara & Taylor’s hands, for the sake of the cameras, as they returned from their mission.
That is: The policy change this much publicized report effected was sold using Taylor’s and McNamara’s names, but was actually the thinking and initiative of JFK’s narrow circle, which at this moment included, on the brassy side, Brute and his assistant Fletch. (Thus spake Prouty.)
1. Is Marine Gen. Charles C. Krulak the son of Marine Gen. Victor Krulak? Shouldn’t be hard to find out, I guess.
Uh yes — that’s a roger. Charles is the son of Victor.
2. Why is Charles coming out of retirement to hit the retired Cheney on the head now?
3. Are you playing the Preakness pool?
September 28th, 2009
One can sign up here to have one of Shakespeare’s sonnets delivered daily. Sometimes works to dispel clouded days, or seed them with perspective.
But perhaps you protest: Some of the sonnets are inpenetrably personal and … well, whiny. But even so, I find, the dish often serves, for one without a wife, to flesh out an automated day.
September 26th, 2009
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Redecorating an old post I was reminded how much I like the magic mirrors of David Dalla Venezia.
Years ago in Italy a friend and I stumbled upon an exhibit of them, and shook the painter’s hand.
Hope he’s well.
September 26th, 2009
Dylan’s first (only?) reading of this lovely thing is on the first Bootleg Series CD (where every track’s a winner).
But I’ve never seen the poem in print before. Came to my attention by way of this gent.
Worth filing away for rainy days.
August 27th, 2009
This profile of the former Cigna exec who fell off his ass on the road to Damascus and has since become an advocate of relatively radical health care reform — answers all the questions again ludicrously in the air now that inbred ill educated assholes are showing up at Town Hall with machine guns.
Hillary — during the election campaign last summer — knew and warned that the health care battle would be a war. And she insisted that if you gave the insurance companies an inch they’d take a mile. She was ready for the war.
Obama, accustomed to charming people, seems to have thought Washington would like him so much that the institutional enemies of reform would cave in. This particular kind of naivete aside, he’s typical of his cohort — people who were impressionable still, ie teenagers, during the Reagantime and view the world thru the frame of corporate television that was born in the 80s.
The health care question is an aspect of the class war that the corporate class reignited during the 80s to found Globalization. It is called war for a reason. If Obama fails — with this astounding majority in the Congress — to get a public health care system up and running, then he will confirm fears of a year ago that he was not ready to be president.
He has the values, but may not have the vision. Hillary and Edwards both saw farther and deeper, into the deep ugly heart of what the USA became in the final quarter of the 20th century.
August 18th, 2009
When News Corp reported quarterly results two weeks ago, Murdoch announced that all websites under the umbrella would convert to paid subscriptions.
No more free lunch.
What will this world be like in 5 years? The affluent will have something like journalism and the rest will be entertained?
The silcon-and-software revolution has been destroying the business of culture for twenty years. Music. Books. Now newspapers.
News Corp now dominates business news in the USA. Perhaps Murdoch’s move will blaze a trail, show the rest (and more worthy) how to survive the onslaught.
August 7th, 2009
While suffering with the business of a crashed hard disk, lost or busted back ups, and thus a lot of lost writing and history, I’ve been reloading music, and finding an old organ grinder, Graham Parker, medicinal.
These, e.g., soothe — from SQUEEZING OUT SPARKS, 1979, the year I gave college a second try, as the Ayatollahs revolted, and Rickie Lee Jones made her fab debut, on the eve of Reaganite destruction:
Nobody Hurts You
I try to pull my weight, study my geography
It doesn’t seem to get me anywhere
I hold a picture up, everybody thinks it’s me
I get a thrill out of tampering with the atmosphere
Hey baby, I’m out of favour
Can’t always be the right flavour
It just seems that no matter what you do
Someone somewhere’s suddenly gotta punish you
Nobody hurts you
Harder than yourself …
You Can’t Be Too Strong
Did they tear it out, with talons of steel
And give you a shot, so that you wouldn’t feel
And wash it away, as if it wasn’t real ?
It’s just a mistake I won’t have to face
Don’t give it a name, don’t give it a place
Don’t give it a chance, it’s lucky in a way
It must have felt strange, to find me inside you
I hadn’t intended to stay
If you want to keep it right, put it to sleep at night
Squeeze it until it could say
You can’t be too strong
You decide what’s wrong …
April 14th, 2009
Watch this episode — “The Warlord” — from I Spy, the late 60s show, then please comment as to whether it may have inspired (along with the Conrad) FF Coppola’s masterpiece a few years later.
The credits say that the episode was written by Robert Culp — the actor sharing the spotlight with Smokin’ Bill Cosby.
And at the very end one discovers the name of the actor playing the Warlord …
Also please comment on how it could be that television departed from this place circa 1969 (when The Name of the Game was airing “The White Birch” about the collapse of the Prague Spring) and ended up where it is today, where international affairs are treated in comic-book video-game fashion on the vile 24.
April 11th, 2009
Dem wuz da daze …
April 11th, 2009
People who were on the money about big money.
March 19th, 2009
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IT OCCURS to me to mark if not celebrate my birthday with Twittering reports from the frontlines of life across this March 19.
Also: to add a sub-category — Writing — to the Conversation database under Arts & Private Life.
Why didn’t I think of that before?
Because I never write about writing here, it would seem.
Right, then. Well, at the moment:
Going thru paper markup. Best readings are on paper, not screen — as this afternoon, sitting in the 58 degree sunshine on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, overlooking the tail end of the East River and the harbor, Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, Wall Street melting, melting …
What can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemmed Manhattan, river and sunset and scallop-edged waves …?
The current screenplay, set in Brooklyn, stars Walt Whitman: The heroine, a fifty-year old black woman, shares his surname, his spirit, and perhaps his blood.
This darn script is dear to my heart, being about facing death, which a number of close people have done in recent years. No one ever wins. The story is about not losing.
“Great, great … Sounds like an art film. Black and white? Great, great …”
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I’ve never worked on a script longer than four months before. But this one, the seventh, since … August 2006. Many drafts, each greater spiritually, and now materially, by the latter which I mean the deadly page count, now less than 130, which puts it in the realm of things sendable to strangers in the movie biz.
All the other scripts: Political stories. Character-driven low-key thrillers, one might say. Graham Greene stuff, one might dare.
Was told re these stories in 2003 — when my fine Old School agent, so proudly acquired with much time and labor, threw up his hands and retired to Paris in response to the invasion of Iraq …
I was then told to stop writing novels, and write screenplays again instead, the novel being dead.
Now it seems they all say nobody anywhere reads an unsolicited screenplay — so write it as a (crummy) book first.
To their credit, they don’t say “novel.” As if to acknowledge in tacit passing, hey, it’s not like we sell novels. We sell books. To movie producers.
When asked in the 80s to name America’s important writers, Gore Vidal replied that it was no longer possible for a writer to be important.
This may have something to do with why I rarely read American novelists my age or younger. Rarely can I bear to. (I do mean the real novelists, not the schlock-meisters.) No, I find even our writers of their generation pretty intolerable and at best tolerably interesting.
Television’s to blame, of course, not only for writers’ lack of facility and style and gravitas, but also for a kind of sophisticated naivete that has made high-brow literature, once again, an art of Consent.
I was born roughly on the cusp, in 1958. TV was thin in the 60s, esp early on. And almost all of it was made for adults.
Today the Tube baby talks. And teaches infants and children how to be people. Shallow Consenting chatterboxes. Who go on to produce the crudest blockbusters. The Alienist. The Lovely Bones.
When Klatuu came to visit, he didn’t sit with a great novelist to talk turkey about the fate of mankind. He sat with a technologist. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on our writers. That they’re no longer competent intellectuals. No longer interesting. No longer capable of speaking with Klatuu. Nobody is. And so he talks with the generals.
But all that aside, I think I don’t read neighboring novelists because novels are about worlds. This is why they’re so important and thrilling when one is young. They introduce us to the worlds.
But by 50 one has met the world one shares with neighboring writers. Knows its irritating little habits. Very hard at that point for a neighbor to interest one in his bemused account of growing up in an artistic family on the Upper West Side.
So one flees to the foreign writers, whose worlds are still largely unknown, even if one has been travelling and reading there for decades.
And one flees to the past. The wealth of novels in English from prior centuries is …
Yes. My greatest treasure.
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Before this past Thanksgiving the Brooklyn script was 160 pages. A sperm whale beached. Didn’t matter, however, since the sworn intent was to produce it myself. Late 2006. Before Wall Street, where I tend to make my living, blew itself to bits.
So now the page count does matter. Cutting back to the 120s, oi … Wasn’t easy.
One would think it’d be easy to simply sit at computer and type one’s own pen-to-paper comments into Movie Magic Screenwriter. But no …
This wine actually helps — by dulling sensibilities that otherwise would revolt and insist on thinking better about this next comment upon a sentence that has already been retouched a hundred times …
Amid the thickly marked pages, in the third of the heroine’s four scenes with her Death & Dying shrink, a particularly tricky comment repeats four times. And thrice with a Bang:
“Cut the Idle Shit!”
A familiar sort of comment. Not easy to deal with. Would prefer something specific and editorial per se.
And what’s with the caps? Who is this ass?
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I don’t know who painted this last. Let’s say the Midtown Master.
The first, of course, is by Paul Klee: The Twittering Machine.
Then Death and Fire. Also by Klee.
Then a painting by David Dalla Venezia, whom I met at one of his exhibits years ago, somewhere in Italy.
March 11th, 2009
Great resource. With an effective search engine.
March 10th, 2009
Came across this Times magazine piece by Tim Weiner while musing about Petraeus and Lansdale in Pakghanistan and Vietnam. Adapted from Weiner’s excellent CIA book of 1995, Legacy of Ashes. Touches on Lansdale among other interesting things.
And it takes one back to that fled world, post Soviet Union before 9/11, when dreams of Peace Dividends and calls for the dissolution of the CIA were in the air, the latter from the likes of New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The CIA is impossibly inpenetrable and corrupted — ungovernable. Better to start over from scratch …
Fled is that music.
But even way back in 1995 all that was something of a cover story, or, rather, an effect of a cover story — an approach to policy distorted and frustrated by the privatization of America’s covert ops capacity, so to speak.
Journalist Joseph Trento (with whom on points I disagree) touches on this firmly in his book Prelude to Terror – The Rogue CIA and America’s Private Intelligence Network (2005).
The privatization of what had been, since the CIA’s founding (1947), its bread and butter work (intelligence collection being merely its cover — its day job), was touched off by:
(i) the cashiering in 1973 of CIA director Richard Helms, a career spook back to the OSS — the Man with dirty hands Who Kept the Secrets — and
(ii) attempts thereafter to clean the Augean stables by presidents — appointing a string of clean-hands DCIs: James Schlesinger, William Colby (who died soon enough in a boating accident) and Stansfield Turner — and by Congress — with the Rockefeller and Church hearings in the Senate, culminating with the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
But when one cleans the stables, what happens to the manure?
An illuminating side-show result of the attempted purgation: George HW Bush’s prez campaign in 1980 was staffed by a lot of retired guys in trenchcoats.
(And his victory in 1988 was the first signal failure of US presidential exit polls. A problem that then slept until … 2000. And 2004. Bush boys don’t poll properly …)
Here’s a recent interview with Trento — worth reading and listening.
To return to Weiner: The ongoing privatization of the private banking black bag work the CIA did for corporate and other chums in the good old days leaves somewhat moot, even in 1995, the isolated CIA question when considering the problems that come to mind when one thinks of the so-called intelligence community.
The problem is now larger and more insinuated throughout the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower’s term now ringing somewhat quaint) than during the days of Gentleman Spy Allen Dulles. Post 9/11, instead of following Moynihan’s lead by simplifying (to clarify) the National Security Apparat, a stampeded Congress slapped on several more layers of bureaucracy. And meanwhile the private sector in this growth industry expanded as never before, under Cheney’s guiding hand in particular.
Today’s rather cleansed CIA, then, is something of a front, more akin to the straight-shooting Pentagon than the dirty-tricks outfit of the golden age.
The dirtiest business — the most unpatriotic business — has been outsourced. To small and mid-sized firms owned and operated by ex-CIA, DIA, FBI, ATF and SS agents, ex-Army Rangers and ex-Navy Seals …
Prouty’s Secret Team in teeming blasted bloom.
March 8th, 2009
The last word, for now, I guess. Worth reading.
February 19th, 2009
Some nice tidbits in Mo Dowd this mornin’ re a Broadway comedy about the recently departed leader of the free world. Funny how dictators become objects of fun. The Eastern Europe experience of the late 80s, early 90s, now come to these shores.
All in good fun. But I’ve got a bottle of bubbly in the fridge with Cheney’s name on it. (No kidding) Waitin’ on a dream …
February 17th, 2009
Ed Note: See comments below to follow the horrible story of escalating veteran suicides across time.
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From the Times:
“The American Army finds itself in a lot of different countries where cultural awareness is critical,” said Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley, the top recruitment officer for the Army.
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General Freakley went on to unveil a new citizenship program that fast-tracks foreigners who speak particular languages. Green Card to Passport in six months.
Seem to recall some Caeser doing something like this.
Guess they must be running out of peeps — oh. Oh my.
Still, a bit odd. Army Recruitment handing out passports. Thought the State Department did that. And Immigration the whole naturalization thing …
And I seem to recall Secretary of State Clinton making a particular point, during her first address from Foggy Bottom, of reclaiming turf and powers lost across recent years to the Pentag–
Hey! You can’t –! Where are my Switzers?! Stop that! General Freakley, who’s in charge here?! You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!!!
Dr Strangelove, I presume?
Who’s the gadfly?
Further developments.
Who’s who …
