Political Theater

How to bear witness to a play when you are in it? What we are witnessing this election year is theater of the absurd and we are all in the cast of millions. The Republican actors are crazed jesters beating each other up like the Three Stooges plus one, while they contort themselves, denouncing a president who bears no resemblance to the straw man of their fevered minds.

Some have time-traveled back centuries where they rightfully belong, conjuring a world of sweat shops, debtor’s prisons and grand inquisitors, those good old days when everyone knew his (and mostly her) place. These are the Fundamentalist fools, home-grown Taliban whose orthodoxy locates them in some Christian version of Waziristan.

Another, to the manor born, is unable to fake authenticity. He is a wind-up toy, a puppet with a Pinocchio nose which elongates with every flip of the flop. When he is not in the counting house counting his off-shore money he is backstage trying to memorize his script.

The fourth is the nihilist who would overthrow the government altogether so we might have food-fights at every corner to determine who has the right-of-way. Bodies may pile up on the street from foul air and poisoned food but who cares? We are tough hombres and the weak don’t deserve to survive anyway.

Let the curtain go down on the clowns. They have polluted the air with their noxious lies, played to the one gallery while the rest of us choke. As the cowboy, the manikin and two would-be Popes make their noise is anyone listening? Could it be that, with every repetition, their lunacy gains a bit of legitimacy in public discourse and moves the spectrum further yet to the right? However outrageous their prattling, it seeps into consciousness.

There is an element in our midst so poisoned with hatred toward Obama they have been deafened to reason. Let them go. Must we all endure this tragicomic drama much longer? One can only hope the so-called debates have revealed the vacancy of their agenda and the irrelevance of the issues raised.

Fortunately there will be another act where the Republican candidate will be forced to address the real matters of urgency. He will have to disown much of what he said to get the nod. Maybe then there will a real debate to determine if we want to live in the 21st century or the 15th, if we want a democracy or theocracy, if we want to lift the millions out of poverty, revitalize the middle class, return our manufacturing base, restore collective bargaining, and check the greed of the privileged few.

Democracy does not make an exciting movie or theater piece. The narrative is an open text, never entirely resolved and the curtain doesn’t go down. However if these months of circus are Act One, I expect the August Convention to be Act Two. My hunch is that the moneyed interests will declare all four clowns as unelectable and multiple ballots will ensue. This will, at least, break the tedium. Out will emerge another Bush or shrub like Daniels or even Christie. By that time he will have shed 100 pounds using the Huckabee diet in which all he eats is the communion wafer.

The Third Act will be the period after that, when Obama debates the real candidate. On Election night we shall either storm the Canadian border for asylum or rejoice that rationality and compassion have triumphed over imbecility and deceit.

Going With The Grain

I am standing in a palette of primary colors, rectangles of crayons, a garden of barcodes. Thirty yards of yellows, oranges and greens screaming at me in garish tones. Pick me up. Buy me! The cereal section grows like weedy dandelions or wild orchids with their seductive tongues hanging out.

It wasn’t always like this. There were Corn Flakes, All-Bran and Shredded Wheat, simple and stately in their boxy mansions. There was Rice Krispies, snap, crackle and popping noiselessly on the shelf. There was Wheaties, Breakfast of Champions, my first newspaper suggesting who I would be if I ever grew up. And Grape Nuts emblemtic in that it is derived from neither grapes nor nuts; a deceit which runs through Kellogg, Post and General Mills, with doubtful claims on all their gaudy boxes. These were the first, going back ninety years or more. And they’ve been sitting on the shelf under the watchful eye of a Ben Franklin look-alike in his Quaker hat on the oatmeal cylinder.

It took pasteurized milk and wax paper to make them a morning habit. The Kellogg brothers showed how far 6th grade drop-outs could go. Battle Creek, Michigan, became their center of operation and many a box top was sent to that address for decoder pins, badges and buttons for beanie hats.

The grocer reached for one or the other with his elongated pincer. This was before self service markets. A counter separated the server and the served. He tallied the items with his #3 pencil, kept behind his ear, onto the paper bag. You shopped 4 or 5 times a week. Ice boxes were small and food spoiled….but not cereal.

Cheerios was born in the early ‘40s, the first oat cereal and hopelessly dull which is why it required a cheery name. After the war, mills boomed with the boomers and colonized the aisle. Can it be my daughters were raised on Frosted Flakes and Fruit Loops? Cavities got bigger. Dentists got rich. Blood sugar zoomed north. Is it any wonder about ten percent of Americans have type-2 diabetes? Then wheat germ (remember that?), bran and fiber became by-words for lean and longevity. Special K, Smart Start. Fiber-Smart, and granola but they have even more carbohydrates. Muesli is a mix of rolled oats or cornflakes with fruit, nuts and seeds, tasteless enough to make it seem healthy but loaded with carbohydrates.

I love my cereal. I could eat it all day and nothing else, providing I drizzle it with blueberries. Got to kill those free radicals. As we all know the only good radical is an oxidized one.

A walk in the cereal section is a sensory experience; less a Mozart concerto than an atonal cacophony, opera-loud, Dixieland-close. Visually, it is a canvas splashed by intoxicated Fauvists. And it seems never to end, like half a football field, five first-downs. I have wasted quality time looking for Raisin Bran Crunch, Honey Bunches of Oats or Golden Grahams. Curious how many brands are out there, I went to a website which lists them all. I counted 140 before finishing the letter C. It’s America, it’s excess and according to William Blake, The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom…for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough.

Walkin and Talkin

A few movie lines from about forty years ago say it all and they were both improvised ...

I’m walkin here, I’m walkin.

You talkin to me?

Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy asserts his right of way across Times Square. Dustin Hoffman is little man, the sleaze and scum of humanity but he is a man taking his place against the machine, stopping life’s traffic. He is the Chinese dissident who stood in front of the tanks in Tiananman Square. He might be a tree-hugger or an occupier holding his ground against Wall St.

Travis Bickle, the Vietnam vet is damaged goods in Taxi Driver. He practices in front of a mirror rehearsing for a confrontation with his hands and his mouth. It wasn’t in the script. De Niro had heard it somewhere. We’ve all heard and maybe said it but not the way he did. Since then those words have found there way into dozens of movies and are immediately recognizable.

Powerlessness and defiance are universals. Another way of saying, fuck you. Peter Finch shouted out the window in Network, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. As I recall in the movie he was mad as hell about the TV rating system which ranked his show down on the list. Paddy Chayefsky voiced his outrage that News programs became entertainment, to juice up their Neilson numbers. However the slogan spread to Everyman, mad as hell about their crushed dreams, about conformity or some inchoate spark gone out.

The other iconic phrase which struck a chord in our collective psyche was said by Marlon Brando in the Godfather. I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse. What better sums up concealed muscle, implicit power, the way Congressman are made an offer from corporate lobbyists…….. vote as you are told or you’ll be back collecting shopping carts in the parking lot.

Pop culture insinuates itself in our vocabulary as a common tongue. It is both a huge megaphone and oversized ear. We are walkin here and we’re mad as hell. At the same time we are impotent, listening close how to gain power, how to make people an offer they can’t refuse. Translate all that to politics and you have the Tea Party, Mad Hatters but not quite sure what the hell they are mad about. Any abstraction will do… government, immigrants, people of color, people who don’t need a church to live a moral life.

The most telling scene in Network occurs when Ned Beatty, chief executive of the conglomerate that owns the station, calls Peter Finch into the boardroom and explains how the world really works. He is told that he’s meddled with the primal forces of Nature, that he has howled about democracy and America and there is no such thing as democracy or an America. There is only I.B.M. and AT &T and Exxon etc… only an international system of currency. At the end of the scene Finch is heard to say, I have seen the face of God. We may be doomed but we’re still walkin and talkin.

Pauline Kael- Lights Out

I have always had a fondness for the New Yorker magazine and that’s why I don’t dare subscribe. I’d be spending my retirement reading it cover to cover. As it is, I depend on doctor’s and dentist’s waiting rooms and the kindness of my strange friends.

I first check out the week’s lineup of writers, the pages of poetry and movie reviews. Up until 1991 the reviewer was Pauline Kael who held that post for 23 years. When she took over full-time it coincided with a creative burst in Hollywood as well as a general social upheaval.

She was a tough cookie who had a lover’s quarrel with movies. If I loved a film and she did too I felt ennobled. If she turned against a movie she dipped her pen in vitriol and damned it like a lover scorned.

She never watched it more than once. I admired that because it demonstrated her non-analytical approach. She responded intuitively and trusted her instincts on an emotional and sensory level. Kael’s take on a film was highly anticipated and often surprising. I wondered from where it sprung.

She was drawn to trashy movies as a way in to the American psyche. It seemed as if she tried to align herself with the mass audience and articulate what they felt and often scold them for being gullible. She understood the appeal of certain Depression era gangster films for their identification as folk heroes and by extension embraced Bonnie & Clyde in 1967. The iconic last scene, done in slow-mo, was like an opera of violence. Yet Kael denounced the violence of Clockwork Orange and the Clint Eastwood movies for de-sensitizing the public. Consistency was not her strong suit.

The New Journalism of the sixties ushered in by Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese was a perfect fit for Pauline Kael. She was part of each review, what she brought to the theater with her and the immediacy of her experience. Her passion lent a certain authenticity to her writing whether or not one agreed or took issue. When she attacked a project she couldn’t fathom why the person under assault took offense because she didn’t intend it personally. She disowned her loose tongue, which became even looser with a few drinks.

When she railed against Terrence Malick’s first film, Badlands, she was called into her editor, William Shawn’s office. He told her that Malick was like a son to him. She replied, Tough shit, Bill. Another infamous blurt occurred when she was a guest along with Ginger Rogers on radio. When Rogers related how her agent had discouraged her from accepting her role in, Kitty Foyle, which won her an Oscar in 1940, Kael responded that her agent was right.

It would be difficult to imagine anyone agreeing with Pauline Kael across the board. She was far too idiosyncratic. However she had her acolytes who admired her commitment to filmmaking and the art form she helped create in her erudite reviews. She was more than a movie reviewer. She was, in part, a social commentator who found a vital sign in the popular art of cinema; a portal into contemporary consciousness. When The Godfather came out she saw it as a tragic reality of our times, the nightmare of American capitalism.

She wrote about the mistreatment of women as depicted in Sam Peckinpaugh's, Straw Dogs. She also detected a whiff of fascism in the trend which assumed a primal violence inherent in all of us. It seemed to me she tried, in vain, to reconcile the thrust of emergent filmmakers widening our imagination with the pernicious forces of exploitation movies and the drift toward vacuous values and lawlessness in American life. She raised the low art to an estimable place, as a window into our ways of seeing, how the new technologies had altered our perceptions and numbed our sensibilities.

Anyone interested in her life story will be fascinated by Brian Kellow's biography, Pauline Kael.

Oscar Night

My problem with the Academy Awards is there are too many losers, not only among the nominated but also the worthy ones which didn’t make the cut. Think of all the acceptances speeches we’ll never hear. Meryl Streep must have a file full of crumpled paper.

The very idea of artists competing for a prize makes no sense to me. Why bestow the honor to one and relegate the others to an inferior position? Artistry can not be quantified. Each script asks for its own stretch and exploration of character, some histrionic, some more inner, relying on facial expression, pauses in delivery and gesture. It’s almost like comparing a cleanup hitter to a power forward, or a poet to a novelist to an essayist. Furthermore, acting is part of an ensemble. The players bounce off each other just as quarterbacks require good linemen and execution by receivers.

How many votes does hype buy? Or is there a Romney effect in which an excess creates a negative vibe? Winners and losers are the result of a balanced campaign with measured amounts of humility and ego, not unlike our presidential election. Except November’s outcome will have real consequences far beyond added revenue for studios.

Based upon the amount of good ink he is receiving it appears that George Clooney and his picture will be the designated winners this year. Clooney is one of my favorite people. I like his politics and the way he puts his money and celebrity where his passions lie. And I like his temperament, how he is contained within himself. However as an actor I think he has a rather limited range; as Dorothy Parker said of Kathryn Hepburn, from A to B. I can imagine that even he knows he does not deserve to win the Oscar this year, nor does his picture, Descendants, but he should get recognition as the Mensch of Hollywood.

Without a doubt, one of the most layered and provocative foreign films of 2011, was the Czech movie, Kawasaki’s Rose. Yet it is not in contention. One wonders what pressures the chosen are under to make their choices. How much weight is assigned to marketplace and how much to the art of cinema? Here is a story of moral ambiguity dealing with the erasure and restoration of collective memory. It warrants a wide distribution. Shame on the Academy for overlooking it.

The expanded list of best picture category is welcomed. In my mind every one should be honored and left at that. We’d at least get to hear all those acceptance speeches. Of course this would ensure a few million fewer viewers and ruin the occasion for Las Vegas which salivates over the betting revenue.

Americans love winners and losers, as befits a nation with the world’s largest economy and military. Might this be a function of our self-declared exceptionalism and arbiter of good taste? Certain countries have called it, cultural imperialism. For almost a century Hollywood has been exporting our values from the dream factory, a beacon to some people and a threat to others.

In ten days I’ll be among the billion viewers, world-wide, enjoying Billy Crystal’s wit, the occasional meaningful reference, amid all the fuss and glam, trying to recall who and what won last year.

Three Point Seven

3.7 Seconds

It doesn’t sound like much time if you are that close to the end of a life unless we’re talking basketball. The clock is winding down.

Lakers up by one point, foul on Toronto, two shots, but wait the Raptors call time out to freeze the shooter. Cut to commercials. Chevy trucks, lite beer, mattresses, plugs for evening shows, back to analysis of game. Announcers set the scene. Kobe is from another planet, he’s cool, doesn’t freeze, sinks a foul shot, then misses one to prove he's human; a veteran at 33.

The clock doesn’t move. Now the Lakers call time out; still 3.7. More commercials, Korean car, e-trading, beer again, car insurance, strategy planned. 3.7 is plenty of time. Close-up of huddle, x’s and o’s. Set a screen. No fouls to give.

Ten minutes have passed. Zoom in on Kobe’s sweat, Fischer’s frown. The crowd is on their feet. Inbound pass goes awry. The clock is running. No more time-outs. Someone throws up a prayer. It doesn’t draw iron, horn goes off. Two-point win for the Lakers; they should have won by 15.

You, at the end of the bench, suited-up but get no minutes. You are there in case 5 guys get injured or are thrown out of the game or the team is down by 37 points with a minute left. At the end of your days; old at 37. You’ve lost a step. Too many back-to-back games. Eyes and limbs un-orchestrated, out of synch. Lungs gasp. Edge gone. 37 and your knees are 73.

Does everything in your dreams bounce and roll; ice cream scoops, balloons, apples, how low the moon to dribble? Do you twist and leap in your sleep, set screens, pick and roll then slamdunk the planet into a black hole? Can you ever stop going one on one? Does competitive blood clot or does it never stop flowing, by the pint, in every vein? Will you be the last to know when to hang it up?

3.7 seconds, minutes, years….the average span of a career. Three point seven years to make ten, twenty million. Then try living like the rest of us, without adoration. Nobody notices you anymore. You didn’t like it before (you said) … but you did. No interviews; who cares what you think? The ovation in your head gets distant and dim.

Teammates have moved to the obit page. You are back on the bench…. guarding pigeons. Times hangs heavy. Like before, three point seven takes forever, til that last flagrant foul and you have run out of time.

One Man's Garbage...

A trip to the trash bin got me in conversation with our landlord. He lords over the land, in the best sense, taking on a stewardship of the grounds. His name is Leigh (pronounced Lee) as in the 18th century poet, Leigh Hunt or as in Vivian Leigh. Leigh is one of those gender-neutral names. Even though most of the letters are silent, our Leigh has a booming voice that can rattle the dishes and probably registers on the Richter scale. The old English meaning of Leigh is meadow which is entirely appropriate.

His thumb is exceptionally green. He is happy planting and pruning in the garden which borders the building on three sides. We chatted alongside a flowering tree he identified as apricot. He said that a tenant, George D., back in the mid 80s, had a habit of throwing his pits and seeds in the earth, and this fruit tree is the result. Old George is now memorialized with white flowers in February, darling buds in May and orangey fruit in July. The branches angle sharply for the sun, obeying their own logic; the kind of tree-ness I most admire.

The garbage I was disposing was a bag of shreddings, rind, celery leafs, egg shells, fruit pits and melon seeds. An all-organic mulch if I had buried it, decomposing to nitrogen, sulfur and other plant nutrients. An entire Farmer’s Market could push its way through the earth. Maybe a rice paddie or sugar plantation will sprout by next year.

The truth is I’ve not planted much in my lifetime except three blossoming daughters and a bushel of words. But I can picture George furtively scattering his refuse in the flower bed 25 years ago ensuring his immortality.

George was a retired male carrier back then. I wonder if he scattered junk mail in the same way. No, not George. I remember him as my go-to guy when I needed some fix-it work. I’m glad to have him back still bearing fruit.

Since George’s apricot pit now graces us I would think that groves of bucolic greenery must be rising out of landfills. Yet my image of such dumps is of vultures wheeling overhead and impoverished families scavenging. On the other hand who knows what ancient garbage lies beneath the great farms and parks of our planet?

Leigh is still out there tending his garden to the ovation of hummingbirds who regularly sip at his buffet of assorted nectar from azaleas to zinnias. Red lanterns will soon emerge on the coral tree and I can almost hear daffodils bursting their bulbs to trumpet the Spring. I leave the rest to George.