Archive for the Arts & Private Life category
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 …
February 16th, 2009
An airline pilot chats about the last (and first) 30 seconds:
“Nobody suffered in this crash … It takes longer to describe it than the whole incident occurred. Pitch up, pitch down, roll, roll, pitch up, roll and it’s done, that quick.”
Lucky bastards.
February 16th, 2009
From Murdoch’s new Wall St Journal:
A graduate of Columbia Journalism School, he was a foreign correspondent for 11 years in the Middle East and wrote feature articles on countless subjects for the Dallas Morning News. One year, the paper nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize.
Now he has a new job: running a strip club. “I feel lucky,” he says.
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February 7th, 2009
Somehow I forgot to mention that I like Cyndi Lauper.
Yow. Wow. Zow. Holy cow.
Miles Davis?
See here!
January 27th, 2009
Has died. The best American novelist since 1945.
A radio interview from 1984.
I read The Coup a year or two ago. Marvelous pitch-perfect comedy, set in a place like Nigeria in the 60s as big oil came on the scene.
A fool in the Times today, while recommending Updike reading, suggested that people might skip the second of the four Harry Angstrom novels — Rabbit Redux — in my humble opinion his single greatest novel. Â Set in 1969, written soon after, now reading as a great historical novel furthermore filled with his intense, precise evocations of inner and outer worlds …
Here’s a bit from an upcoming book of his final poetry:
It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!â€
Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.â€
For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.
As if to emphasize the loss, I find myself reading The Da Vinci Code. The gargantuan bestseller.  The writing: embarassing garbage. The thinking: adolescent. What we’ve become.
Also today: The Washington Post announces it will junk Book World, its Sunday book review section.
January 23rd, 2009
The Sunday magazine takes a break from the sociopolitical.
November 13th, 2008
There has never been a place on TNC to post comments about “The Libraries of Sarajevo and the Book that Saved Our Lives” by Kemal Bakarsic.
Now, thoughts may be posted here below.
November 13th, 2008
It’s almost four years since journalist Gary Webb was suicided.
Here he speaks.
Webb in the mid 90s had re-broken in a big way the big story of the CIA’s involvement in the international drug trade — updating old tales from Vietnam by documenting CIA-NSC responsibility for the Crack explosion in American cities during the Reagan years.
Webb’s serial newspaper reportage in 1996 bore the name Dark Alliance, and was republished in a book of the same name.
Those were the Clinton years; the stories not only got published, but drew widespread attention from the major media.
But Webb himself was soon and suddenly fired by his San Jose newspaper — which also destroyed its web archive of the Dark Alliance story. Soon it was clear that the author had been blacklisted out of the business.
A month after Bush-Cheney were re-installed in 2004, Webb was shot twice in the head and died. Suicide, the coroner reported. Neither Little Jimmy Grimaldi nor Webb’s friends believe that.
Read his book.
And think about Daniel Moynihan in 1991 …
“The time has come to ask, with the Cold War over, can we purge the vestiges of this struggle from our laws, our bureaucracy, and most importantly from our way of thinking,” Moynihan said. “Can we muster the will to redefine ourselves?”
And then tell YourObama to purge and reform the National Security Apparat.
November 12th, 2008
The Strong Man, a biography of John Mitchell, Nixon’s atty general and campaign manager, and one of the first and largest bodies to fall from the heavens as the Watergate scandal unfolded, came out earlier this year.
Jim Hougan (author of two important books, Spooks and Secret Agenda, the latter about Watergate) and others commented on the new Mitchell book at the Education Forum, which across the years has housed perhaps the best discussion of inter alia the JFK murder.
I posted a comment in response to Hougan’s overview of the book, and asked him three questions. He replied. All visible here.
The discussion may not be entirely rooted in nostalgia. There is a tenuous Bush family connection that reaches, yet alive, into the present day. If looking for a quicky — here.
November 11th, 2008
I posted a comment (the 9th) at my friend Peter Gilbert’s site, De Unione Ecclessiarum.
The discussion there had moved from Peter’s thoughts about the election to consternation among some readers about changes in abortion law perhaps forthcoming.
My comment is about three strata of legal principles underlying Roe v Wade — and about how the trimester scheme of Roe corresponds in a way to old Christian principles about how and when a fetus becomes “animated” (by a soul).
November 9th, 2008
I’ve revamped my little memoir of that happy week or so, with a lot more photos and a bit more scrip.
November 9th, 2008
Recent MUST READS in the NY Review of Books:
On Cheney.
On the financial crisis — by George Soros.
And the full interview that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave before resigning — in which he renounces militarism as a possible basis of Israeli security.
November 3rd, 2008
Only thing that I did wrong
Was staying in the wilderness too long
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold on
The great questions in the air — about how much lasting constitutional and foreign-affairs damage Bush-Cheney have done, about the ways and means of turning things around, and the capacity of the american people to be citizens rather than consumers — leave me for the moment speechless.
I do think the turn in the works is a major turn.
A premise there, however, is that the forces behind the Fascist Shift of the new century are not deeply rooted and are exhausted for now — leaving the new administration a horrible mess, yes, but also a durable mandate and some elbow room.
But — if the premise is false, then four years from now we may see Romney on the verge of victory, and the young Obama already a has-been.
This was one reason why, this past winter, I thought Hillary the better candidate for the Donkeys to nominate — to allow her to absorb the worst of the blast, while holding Obama in reserve.
But … The hour of doom is at hand. Let the sun shine …
The mandate will not be large. LBJ in 1964, riding a wave of sympathy re Kennedy’s murder the year before, gathered 486 EC votes and carried 44 states.
Nothing near that is in the cards for Obama. Rather, somewhere between 289 and 364 votes, with 22 to 27 states, plus D.C.
Clinton got 370 votes and 31 states in ’92. And 379 and 30 in ’96. Plus D.C. in each.
Reagan has the all-time high, against hapless Mondale in ’84, with 525 votes and 49 states. Then FDR in 1936, against Landon, with 523 and 46 (of 48 total) states. And then Richard Nixon in ’72, contra hapless McGovern. 520 votes and 49 states.
Then again … Even the greatest EC landslides were, roughly speaking, five people voting chocolate and five vanilla. Fifty-three Pistachio, forty-seven Rocky Road.
Wasted Years
No matter what happens on Tuesday and across the next four years, there is no escaping or re-writing the fact that the failures to apply Due Process in the 2000 election, and to depose Bush-Cheney in 2004, were costly beyond measure and plain evidence that, on the national level, we are not a functioning democracy.
Only thing that we did right
Was the day we began to fight
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold on
It’s an open question — whether WE can fight at all.
But … Team Obama has. They’ve run an amazing campaign — principled and potent.
Can the example revive an increasingly impoverished and brain-dead citizenry?
Too Long in Exile
Seems all my NY friends are holing up Tuesday night. Me, I think it’s the first thing in the public sphere worth celebrating since … Can’t recall.
Let’s have a General Strike on Wednesday. And then, to the business of rebuilding.
Til We Get the Healing Done
Where’s my blue suede shoes?
Aha — a final pre-election postscript: Great overview from a waning & weeping Laissez Faire fellow in the London Daily Telegraph.
October 28th, 2008
I didn’t know this doc from 1976 was on the web.
It features a lengthy interview with hero Roger Craig, a Deputy Sheriff in Dallas who, among other things:
– was on the trail of a Grassy Knoll assassin within moments of the murder, and
– was present when the rifle of the Book Depository was discovered and found to be a sharpshooter’s Mauser (not the old Italian soldier’s rifle that the Warren Commission reported and attributed to Lee Oswald).
Pressing these differences across the years seems to have cost Mr Craig his life. From the excellent Spartacus vault run by John Simkin in England:
In 1973 a car forced Craig’s car off a mountain road. He was badly injured but he survived the accident.
In 1974 he surviving another shooting in Waxahachie, Texas.
The following year he was seriously wounded when his car engine exploded. Craig told friends that the Mafia had decided to kill him.
Roger Craig was found dead on 15th May, 1975. It was later decided he had died as a result of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
Craig’s suiciding prompted another hero, the attorney Mark Lane, author of two of the most important books on the subject, to put together this documentary, based on a filmed interview conducted with Craig in 1974.
Very much worth watching. Five parts, all there on YouTube.
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It’s hard to always look away …
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