“If I can read this strange old guy’s mind aright, he’s drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.”
John Updike, following on the heels of Norman Mailer, died recently, leaving a blank space in the New York Review of Books, where until quite recently he ran lovely articles covering art exhibitions and museum visits. His was an acute eye, and I’ll miss his observations which I always found intelligent and eloquently written. Rabbit runs no more.
Speaking of the NYRB, while I seldom read books (really – though I’m presently picking slowly through John McPhee’s massive collection Annals of the Former World ) I have been addicted to this journal for now 40 years or so, reading it cover to cover, regardless of my interest in any given article. And the “personals” which seem to demonstrate that its readership began back then and has sat firmly still since, so that the median age of those posting has shifted from the late 20’s back then, to something around 60-70 now. Though the sales spiels have remained pretty much the same – literary, often pretentious, “cultured”, generally well-off “left.” For sure most of them would assert they are into ecology and whatnot, though their travels and second homes make clear it’s a certain kind of wealthy pathology.
The kind of salad an NYRB person might eat (this one is from Brazil)
Travis B. Gay and his wife Stephanie, from Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, all of 26 years old, proud owners of the above house, or at least its mortgage, pickup, SUV, and so it was said, big new plasma screen TV, are miffed that a program which they signed onto which would “forgive” the $100,000 hole they bought into in order to go to college is no longer functioning. The State borrowed the money for the program to cover its own holes. What ever happened to the American dream? What - at 26 I don’t deserve a large house, couple of gas guzzlers, big TV to watch, and I have to pay my education bills? WTF! I would bet 10 to 1 Travis and his wife are Republicans too, staunch believers in The Market Economy model of how to structure a society, and think public medical programs are Socialist ! But if the lining goes in their wallet, that’s another story. Just ask the subsidised farmers, arms makers and others who also think social welfare is a communist plot.
Thunder-thighs of Wichita
The young women above are praying at the site of the murdered doctor in Kansas who performed legal surgeries to which some of our citizenry object. Statistically it seems most of those objecting, who label themselves “pro-life,” also support the death penalty. Dr. George Tiller was gunned down in the church he attended, provoking much radio talk-show heavy-breathing.
I’m an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas but not afraid to speak my lonesomeness in a car, because not only my lonesomeness it’s Ours, all over America, O tender fellows– & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy in the moon 100 years ago or in the middle of Kansas now. It’s not the vast plains mute our mouths that fill at midnite with ecstatic language when our trembling bodies hold each other breast to breast on a matress– Not the empty sky that hides the feeling from our faces nor our skirts and trousers that conceal the bodylove emanating in a glow of beloved skin, white smooth abdomen down to the hair between our legs, It’s not a God that bore us that forbid our Being, like a sunny rose all red with naked joy between our eyes & bellies, yes All we do is for this frightened thing we call Love, want and lack– fear that we aren’t the one whose body could be beloved of all the brides of Kansas City, kissed all over by every boy of Wichita– O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me– On the bridge over the Republican River almost in tears to know how to speak the right language– on the frosty broad road uphill between highway embankments I search for the language that is also yours– almost all our language has been taxed by war. Radio antennae high tension wires ranging from Junction City across the plains– highway cloverleaf sunk in a vast meadow lanes curving past Abilene to Denver filled with old heroes of love– to Wichita where McClure’s mind burst into animal beauty drunk, getting laid in a car in a neon misted street 15 years ago– to Independence where the old man’s still alive who loosed the bomb that’s slaved all human consciousness and made the body universe a place of fear– Now, speeding along the empty plain, no giant demon machine visible on the horizon but tiny human trees and wooden houses at the sky’s edge I claim my birthright! reborn forever as long as Man in Kansas or other universe–Joy reborn after the vast sadness of War Gods! A lone man talking to myself, no house in the brown vastness to hear, imaging the throng of Selves that make this nation one body of Prophecy languaged by Declaration as Happiness! I call all Powers of imagination to my side in this auto to make Prophecy, all Lords of human kingdoms to come Shambu Bharti Baba naked covered with ash Khaki Baba fat-bellied mad with the dogs Dehorahava Baba who moans Oh how wounded, How wounded Sitaram Onkar Das Thakur who commands give up your desire Satyananda who raises two thumbs in tranquility Kali Pada Guha Roy whose yoga drops before the void Shivananda who touches the breast and says OM Srimata Krishnaji of Brindaban who says take for your guru William Blake the invisible father of English visions Sri Ramakrishna master of ecstasy eyes half closed who only cries for his mother Chaitanya arms upraised singing & dancing his own praise merciful Chango judging our bodies Durga-Ma covered with blood destroyer of battlefield illusions million-faced Tathagata gone past suffering Preserver Harekrishna returning in the age of pain Sacred Heart my Christ acceptable Allah the Compassionate One Jahweh Righteous One all Knowledge-Princes of Earth-man, all ancient Seraphim of heavenly Desire, Devas, yogis & holymen I chant to– Come to my lone presence into this Vortex named Kansas, I lift my voice aloud, make Mantra of American language now, I here declare the end of the War! Ancient days’ Illusion! and pronounce words beginning my own millennium. Let the States tremble, let the Nation weep, let Congress legislate it own delight let the President execute his own desire– this Act done by my own voice, nameless Mystery– published to my own senses, blissfully received by my own form approved with pleasure by my sensations manifestation of my very thought accomplished in my own imagination all realms within my consciousness fulfilled 60 miles from Wichita near El Dorado, The Golden One, in chill earthly mist houseless brown farmland plains rolling heavenward in every direction one midwinter afternoon Sunday called the day of the Lord– Pure Spring Water gathered in one tower where Florence is set on a hill, stop for tea & gas
Wichita Vortex Sutra, Allen Ginsberg, 1966
Scott Roeder, killer of Dr. Tiller
Father and son of Sgt. John M. Russell, who after 3 tours of duty, killed 4 fellow GI’s in Iraq
To wrap up, Errol Morris has a very nice, long and interesting essay piece in the NY Times, springing from an examination of the dubious forgeries of Van Meegeren of Vermeer.
Cy Twombly at Chicago Art Institute new Renzo Piano wing
The average American household is saddled with nearly $8,400 of credit card and other revolving debt, according to Economy.com analysis of government data.
[look at the eyes of the boys and man -we're so welcome as Mr Brooks would have it?]
I have traveled rather extensively throughout the US, and as well elsewhere in the world. In America, in almost every small town and city, along with the Elks, the Rotary, Moose Lodge, and others, there are also the VFW and American Legion. Usually these are run-down places, a bar and dance floor, an assembly room, some offering their parking lots as trailer parking spaces for members. They are ubiquitous, and glide by nestled in the landscape almost unremarked, except during elections when they invariably support Republican candidates and on national holidays when they’ll be festooned with flags. You’ll find their members out on July 4th and other patriotic day parades. While it may be that my cultural antennae aren’t good enough to read it, when I have been in other countries I don’t recall ever having seen similar such places announcing themselves.
So embedded into our culture are these that we scarcely notice their meaning, or give them a thought. Veterans of Foreign Wars. American Legion. Though were we to give it a thought we’d have to admit that indeed America is rather often “over there” warring away. The list of American military actions abroad is far too long to list here, but a check at Wikipedia will glaze over your eyes, and prompt an understanding of just why all those VFW and Foreign Legion halls bedeck our landscape. And today’s news announces that as we wind down the “war” in Iraq (never declared by Congress, the Constitutional prerogative and duty of which it is to so declare), Obama is cranking up the other undeclared war in Afghanistan, however much he seems to dress it up with extra rhetorical flourishes. Foreign wars are as American as, well, apple pie. Yesterday, along this line, in response to a column by David Brooks in the New York Times, I wrote this (surely not to be published)
Sirs:
After cautioning about his doubts (The Winnable War), Mr Brooks concludes with bright optimism about American actions in Afghanistan, and comes to this line,
“Foreign policy experts can promote one doctrine or another, but this energetic and ambitious response — amid economic crisis and war weariness — says something profound about America’s DNA.”
I could go Google 100 statements from Mr Brooks about another quite recent war, of which he burbled with similar enthusiasm for American military adventures; however he might succinctly summarize his conclusions about our national DNA by simply saying:
Wars R Us.
Sincerely
Jon Jost
“Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.”
Quoted by Woodward and Bernstein, allegedly said by Henry Kissinger to General Al Haig
I grew up in the military, my father being an officer in the Army. Ft Benning, occupation troops in Hokaido Japan, Ft Leavenworth, post-war occupation in Trieste Italy and then Augsburg Germany, and then a final family stint in the suburbs of Washington DC while Col. Jost was a desk jockey in the Pentagon, a Chief Personnel Officer for the Army in Vietnam, if what I was told is correct. Like other Army brats I got full exposure to the military mentality – an exposure that seems to produce two quite different reactions. For some the medicine takes, with the sons following in the footprints of the father, taking up the military tradition and its behaviors. But for others – and I have met a fair amount of these in my travels, and found many creative sorts among them – it makes for a forceful foundation against which to rebel, as I did. In my case it was perhaps a bit more extreme as I refused to cooperate with the Selective Service and landed, much to my father’s surprise and consternation, in prison rather than in uniform. While I could hardly say we ever had a meaningful conversation prior to that act, we certainly never had one since. While I differ profoundly with Mr Kissinger on most things, I sadly concur on his judgment on those in the military, though there are of course many who are not, except in that fundamental first point, stupid. It is only their acceptance of the “sign up” gambit which is stupid, though given the social pressures, it is understandable. Like most cultures I am familiar with, America is a place where “boys and their balls” (my phrase for the accumulated matter of guys and gonads) is a celebrated locus for our social constructs. Boys are taught from the beginning that certain masculine things, like guns, and killing, or swinging bats, or tossing footballs, are of paramount value. This is perhaps more exaggerated in rural towns where a certain kind of “patriotism” is a given – even if it contradicts other values in the same people, like “small government,” low taxes, and the rest. And it is clear that those at the top of the power structure, the Kissinger-type people, know only too well how to play those sentiments like a Wurlitzer. And thus our landscape is dotted with the VFW and American Legion halls, and monuments to the fallen. Most come from towns like these:
Beacon NY
[This must be from a movie, so fake does it look.]
Cottage Grove, Oregon
And given training and discipline, they become men.
Of course, honoring the dead of war has a long lineage for us.
SOMETHING there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down!” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Profiting from another’s misery is, of course, an old story. Read the spam you get sent. In the news of late have been some interesting stories on how America ” works.” One of them is about Penny Mac, a new company which has arisen out of the ashes of an older one, Countrywide. The latter did mortgages, and was one of the instigators of the present housing bubble crash. Executives from it have managed to borrow a mess of money and are now buying up defaults cheap, refinancing, and, well, making more money based on the mess they produced and from which they profited earlier, though leaving others to hold the empty bag. Now that is capitalism!!
“In an insane world, the person who is rational has the problem. Money is as addictive as cocaine.” — Andrew Lo, a professor of financial engineering.
For some decades now, in the economics departments across the academic landscape, it has been the “Chicago School,” (Milton Friedman, most famously) which has ridden high in the saddle, espousing the kind of economics that has landed us in this mess. These are those of “the short sharp shock” of Thatcherism. Leave it to Ivory Tower “thinkers” to get very detached from reality and in due time have their theories, brought into practice in the big real world, bring ruin to all. Back in the 60’s it was the Best and Brightest (aka Robert McNamara et al) who ushered in the Viet Nam war, sure they knew better than everyone how to manage with up to date methods the nasty matter of war. More recently Mr. “Stuff Happens” Rumsfeld followed precisely in the same footprints. So now, as the unfolding economic debacle reveals the hollowness of theory, and these economists (Greenspan, Paulson, etc.) scamper to lay blame anywhere but at their own feet, doubtless we will be treated to arcane new theories and numbers which won’t, of course, do a damn thing for those recently booted from their houses thanks to the glories of plain old fashioned socially and politically encouraged greed in the form of con-men high and low issuing sucker loans and mortgages, and credit card issuers jacking up their %, all to a deliberately dumbed-down and now numbed-out unterclass, which bought into the slick promotions that promised everything for nothing down and a little tiny print about something later.
Economists seem in general not to be into morals. And their practitioners – businessmen – seem not to be into ethics. Every man for himself. Darwinian blah blah. He who dies with the most toys wins, says the bumper sticker.
Calvin Coolidge
“The business of America is business.”
And you can trust assured that for Republicans, this statement is the god-almighty truth, and they make sure they practice it as a religion. In fact, as many recent mega-church pastors have said, sort of following in the statement of a recent Chinese communist premier (Deng Xiaoping) who said “To get rich is glorious,” being filthy rich is a sign that God loves you and you are doing right. Indeed.
Robert Schuyler’s Crystal Cathedral, Orange County Ca.
Meantime back in the numbers racket, this:
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Freddie Mac, one of the two main U.S. mortgage companies that the U.S. government is depending on to help stabilize the housing market, said on Wednesday it needs $30.8 billion from the Treasury to survive after a massive fourth-quarter loss.
Interestingly, in the NYT article saying this they fail to actually mention how much money old Freddie Mac has already gobbled up in US taxpayer largesse: $284 billion to 150 billion, split between Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (don’t you love these folksy names) – I can’t find an actual figure for Freddie in a quick Google search. So Joe Public coughs up another 30.8 billion or Freddie goes under. Where, to whom, why, how all this money goes remains a matter of opaqueness, along with the other estimated 3-9 trillion bucks being used to prop up our glorious system, pride of the nation, or at least of the 1% of the filthy rich part. The rest are being played, as usual, for suckers.
Ah, but Mr. Schuyler will be happy to pray for you up there on his television monitor while you sit in the sun-splashed SoCal pews, and, deep in Orange County, surely vote Republican.
The national news meme for our two permitted slightly different political parties is that Republicans, The Grand Old Party, are the guardian of thrift, of small government, of national security, etc. Re the matter of national security – on just whose watch, and given ample forewarning of imminent threat, did the 9/11 attack occur? And of the former items, see the below.
“We need to take our hands off the handlebars, or the training wheels, at some point,” Maj. Gen. David G. Perkins, the chief American military spokesman, said Monday.
George Bellows
American naive, at National Gallery
Walker Evans
Gary Winogrand
Philip Guston
Martin Heade
J-M Basquiat
Joel Sternfeld
Frank Gehry does blast walls
de Tocqueville:
“As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?”
“In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.”
“In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.”
In the past brief month and a half there was a US Presidential inauguration, a handful of skittering little political scandals, a wave of panic over the collapsing global economy, and a constant drumbeat of negative fiscal news. Some million plus Americans lost their jobs in those 6 weeks; surely millions of others gave up hopes of finding work. The official unemployment stands around 7%, though most officials understand these figures are unreal, the method of measurement having been jiggled way back in Jimmy Carter’s day, in order to help mask the unhappier truth. Real unemployment is something closer to 15%, and in places like California edging on 20%. To say, we’re in a most predictable pickle, though our experts, as usual, missed this one by a mile. Of course, those experts – like Paulson and current Treasury Secretary Geithner had certain self-interests helping them miss the signs of trouble coming up the track – they were making tens of millions with the system gamed as it was.
But, of course, behind every darkening cloud, there’s a silver lining for someone.
Suddenly it seems as if everyone is going to the movies, with ticket sales this year up 17.5 percent, to $1.7 billion, according to Media by Numbers, a box-office tracking company.
And it is not just because ticket prices are higher. Attendance has also jumped, by nearly 16 percent. If that pace continues through the year, it would amount to the biggest box-office surge in at least two decades.
Americans, for the moment, just want to hide in a very dark place, said Martin Kaplan, the director of the Norman Lear Center for the study of entertainment and society at the University of Southern California.
“It’s not rocket science,” he said. “People want to forget their troubles, and they want to be with other people.”
Of course the films of choice do not wrestle with the real problems these audiences are trying to escape; quite the opposite. Slumdog Millionaire (which I have not seen), contrives to paint a rosy scenario out of the depths of Mumbai poverty. [My friend Dennis Grunes reports that to add insult to injury, the film's co-director, Loveleen Tandon, an Indian woman who clearly had a major hand in directing the Indian children, showing a touch ever lacking in Mr Boyle's work, was totally excluded from the Oscar recognition, showing perhaps the impacted colonialist mentality that still quivers in the English (Scots in this case) heart.] It’s been suggested that this film became a hit owing to its unintended timely resonance with today’s financial realities. Which is to say that while Americans supposedly voted for “change you can believe in” when confronted with the reality of the cumulative effects of their own behavior – running up credit card, student loan, mortgage debts so high they’ll never pay them off, while accepting the quantum leap equivalent in the stock market (don’t wanna look too hard at how those gazillions are being made…) – they show that deep down inside they really want to keep things like their imagined normal: get lucky at Vegas or on American Idol and for minimum input come out a billionaire with no effort. So Hollywood profits by merely sucking up the psychological consequences of its own socially derelict product, the dream factory rolls on cranking out more delusions, more future troubles, playing out its role as a metaphor for everything wrong about American culture. Of course it is one of the country’s most lucrative exports, along with arms and corporately farmed food stuffs.
By coincidence the other night, around 4 am, Marcella jabbed a deep-in-sleep me in the ribs, exclaiming, “look at this!” She was watching a film on her notebook, Penn’s Into the Wild. The occasion for pulling me out of my slumbers was to point at the name Alenka Pavlin floating by in the tail credits. Alenka and I lived together way back in 1985-7. She moved down to LA from San Francisco long ago, following her interests in sound recording. She was boom operator for Penn on this one, getting travels all over for 6 months. Lucky her.
Of course, like more or less all those who trundled stylishly dressed to the dais to receive their golden dildo, as well as those who sat splendorously to watch them, they all land somewhere on the upper levels of the income charts of the US, if not among the exclusive club of mostly financial-corporate CEO souls whose wealth is measured in mere billions. Hollywood stars are amply rewarded though, enough to push them to the top percentile or so in earnings. Meanwhile Joe Blow has seen this:
Or, as the recent unemployment figures underline, they are dropping precipitously far lower than this graph suggests. Of course this graph lies, like graphs often do, by failing to tell just what this ascending Gross Domestic Product was composed of – what was America busy making? As mentioned, we were cranking out food, and movies, and weapons, though not as this graph would suggest in such accelerating amounts. Nope. What we were busy manufacturing during these years, under the philosophical guidance of the Bush administration in which regulation, oversight, or just following-the-laws, were brushed aside in the interests of globalization and “the Free Market” and other such shibboleths, so that we could make “financial instruments” like derivatives and bundled debts and the entire Wall Street lexicon of fiscal mumbo-jumbo which has all proved to spell something like P-O-N-Z-I. Though on a scale which makes that name origin look like chump change. So in fact our “product” actually reflected not the top line on the above graph, but the bottom one: we were just chuggin’ along at make-do level. With one major problem – most were doing it just like the guys on the top were doing it, on imaginary money, running up credit card debt of one kind or another, charging it to their expanding home “value,” and other such bookkeeping sleights-of-hand. But now the piper is calling and everyone is showing empty pockets. And, as we are seeing, the Reaganite trickle-down is coming as an apocalyptic deluge, but in negatives: the Wall Street hot shots cut back on the $5 latte and there goes the local barrista to the unemployment line, along with the aspiring actor cum waiter, and the myriad other members of our supposedly new “service industry” economy. The fabulously wealthy scamsters of the corporate world are suddenly bust, and along with them goes all the “servicing,” classy call-girl blow-jobs and all. The spiral down is now an avalanche, as in the fabled (and false) explanation of how the World Trade Center fell – one floor pancaking to the next in a vertical domino effect, but here it’s fiscal entities heading at gravitational speed to terra firma.
For the record, again, I feel certain that 9/11 is so full of fishy aspects that it must have been some kind of inside job. The image of Mr Bush reading My Pet Goat (upsidedown – what an example to the kids…) smacks of a rich kid who just did something real nasty and just found out about it:
Mr Bush, who has seemingly vanished from the world, was quoted before he departed as pondering, in a kind of poor-little-me manner, “why did it (the economic melt-down) have to happen on my watch?” Indeed. It must not have had anything to do with his policies, enforcement of existing law, example of brazen law-breaking himself, or the rampant corruption at all levels which characterized his administration. Just a coincidence, of course.
So while the nation and the world took a deep breath of hopeful release as Obama took up the keys to the national vehicle, the clatter of ever-worse news has muffled the sighs of content. Certainly it appears that he’s a can-do kind of guy, and has surrounded himself with like-minded help, but one senses it all may be – despite the astounding numbers tossed about (700 billion here, 1.3 trillion there, 7 trillion cumulatively over there …. our eyes glaze over in incomprehension at these can’t-imagine digits) too little way too late. Nor can we, or those bandying them about, really gauge just what they might do aside from burning up the Treasury printing presses. As they themselves seem to say, they’re doing it because they have to, “to save the system.”
And indeed that seems to be the fundamental problem – an incapacity to let go of what is transparently a rotten system, in which these crises are cyclical and predictable, having to do with some of the basic rules of that system. Like its arch-rival, “communism” (whichever label one puts on it, in America anything that hints of some gentle mode of “socialism” is deemed irredeemable on utterance), capitalism comes out of the womb with a built in sure-fire Achille’s Heel. With communism the problem is actually the same as with capitalism, with just the shifting of a few words which have proven to be interchangeable. Capitalism posits that “the economic market” will sort out all values, deliver the most efficient delivery of things to ever happier souls, and make for a little paradise here on earth. It does this by economic competition, in which the strong/better etc. survive and are well-rewarded for their services to humanity. That this system seems to repeatedly result in skewed income charts, booms and busts, not to mention a broader rampage of damage on the environment, social relations, and the human psyche is thought to be irrelevant to those fundamentalists of the Market. As Mr Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush are inclined to respond to those who point out these problems – “So what?” Indeed. Communism makes similar promises, if only for a temporary time we place dictatorial power in well-intentioned hands for a short term in order to build a workers’ paradise on earth. We’ve seen what happened with that one in China, the old USSR, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and elsewhere. Somehow the honey of this power attracts a certain kind of personality, and the shift to an anarchic non-government of happy collectives is ever delayed, while Mao orchestrates his Great Leaps and plays with his concubines, or Pol Pot plows his killing fields.
In both ideologies something is fundamentally amiss, something so obvious and self-evident that it is hard to think that grown-ups actually believe them. Especially since for the most part myths and fables and the collective wisdom of the ages all say pretty much the same thing and we’ve attempted (always failing) to build social restraints to minimize these things. Left to their own devices, humans are pretty selfish and greedy; surrounded with a system, like a capitalist one which celebrates wealth, and hence greed, a lot of people will not hesitate to trample over the next person to get whatever there is to be gotten first. Along the way they and their cohorts will of course construct a social and psychological framework to support this and all its consequent results. They will be celebrated, churches will bless them, and so on. Communism does the same thing, except shifts “power” into play instead of “wealth” (though in practice those in power in communist cultures were always the wealthiest as well, duh…). Boiled down to essences there are probably certain percentages of any populace of people who are either genetically and/or socially predisposed to seek and have power – for the psychological pleasure of it. In either capitalist or communist systems these people are funneled to their appropriate place on top of the heap, and they then indulge their inner selves to their needs. Hello Mr Stalin, Lenin, Mao, or though carrying a differing banner but espousing essentially the same things, hello Mr Schicklegruber, a.k.a. Hitler. And there are people who like to follow authoritarian leaders, so a perfect mix.
One would think with the plethora of example before us, we’d figure it out and see that the basic flaw in these “systems” is staring us in the mirror. All that capitalism and communism do, precisely because they are systems, is to amplify this human constant of greed and power-hunger.
So as this crisis hits the US, as well as the rest of the world, rather than, as Mr Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel suggests one should do and turn a crisis into a moment of opportunity, we find all the powers that be directed toward “saving the system.” They’ll modify this and that, make it environmentally a bit more sane, try to ameliorate the vast income disparities, trim back the military a touch, and basically do a lot of cosmetics aimed to resuscitate a failed system. We hear Obama assert in his Inaugural Address that “we will not apologize for our way of life” – without noting that “our way of life” is that 5% of the world’s population consumes 25% of its energy; that a tiny fraction of that 5% owns some obscene chunk of the world’s wealth, and so on. We don’t hear that were the entire globe to live in the manner Americans live (even those gliding along on that bottom line on the chart), we could kiss our asses communally good-bye in short order.
What we need to do, for ourselves, and for this little hospitable site we live on, is to question the entire system, question our entire set of values and priorities, and commence with some profound changes in how we all live. But it is a characteristic of systems like “capitalism” or “communism” that they cannot do such things as question themselves in such a manner. Just like religious fundamentalists cannot do so. Instead it seems, despite ample historical examples to give us cautionary lessons, we must drive ourselves over a cliff, into a real hard inescapable catastrophe before we are willing to adjust our behavior in any significant manner. At the moment we’re in the prelude, likely with a major depression building around us, with all its attendant probable social-political ramifications (wars, famines, the usual company of such tragedies), and rather than confront this impending matter, we prefer to make some minor adjustments hoping it will all just go away and allow us to resume a few years hence in a manner something just like we were doing.
In which case it is somewhat more likely we’ll be looking like the pair in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I recently finally finished reading. For the most part a compelling book though I felt it was a bit redundant (hard not to be when the world has been stripped down to almost nothing), and that the ending was a tad too upbeat. I’ll be curious to see how the film copes with it – almost guaranteed to be a big box office loser, especially in these depression bound times when most would prefer a frothy musical to lose a few hours in.
For me it’s back to classes this coming week. Two a week, one being the Visual Directing kind of foundation here’s-what-DV-can-be course, and the other this time around being make-a-feature-with-Jon. Meaning we have to crank out a new feature in the coming 4 months, using students as help, actors, sources for places, settings, ideas. I have not given it a thought, wanting to have it be generated from whatever we can piece together in the first few weeks. I’m completely open.
Meantime on our trip to Singapore-Malacca-Kuala Lumpur (see cinemaelectronica) some possible future options seem to open up – a perhaps teaching job in S’pore and maybe later on setting up a kind of school in Malaysia. We should know more of these soon. While on journey we got an urgent email from Yonsei, urging me to sign contract for the coming year. This was a bit uncharacteristic as last year they’d waited late in the game to indicate they’d be wanting me back. Word must have drifted.
The teaching term is over at Yonsei, Marcella’s sisters and friends are gone and outside it is discouragingly cold. No jaunts for the moment to other places, and instead the computers on my desk (two up and running, another awaiting a power unit to join the fray, and the notebook I write this on) are humming away. I’m in a workaholic mood and am busy editing. Firstly on SWIMMING IN NEBRASKA, a work shot in Lincoln Nebraska in 2006, with friends and acquaintances there. It will be a kind of counterpoint to the presumed provincialism of such places, which begets quizzical looks and questions like, “Lincoln Nebraska, why’d you live there?” I suspect that we landed there in part because Dan Ladely at the Ross Media Center, who arranged the artist’s residency I was on, knew that I didn’t have such a view about the mid-west and would happily spend some time there. Which we did, and it was indeed a fruitful and enjoyable time, including a little project in Cherry County, a vast area of the Nebraska Sandhills, where Marcella and I went to teach the very young students and their teachers in one-room school houses how to use DV cameras, and do some basic editing, with the idea they’d make a portrait of these places before State economics closed them down. We had a great time, and it seemed our charges did as well. At the conclusion there was a screening for them and their families in the only cinema in Valentine. A lotta cowboy hats.
And while in Lincoln, meeting people and making new friends, SWIMMING IN NEBRASKA developed. I imagine it will be a kind of essay, obliquely, by way of showing just a sliver of what is in Nebraska offering a critique of those who imagine it to be nothing – a bland if long drive on Interstate 80, or a distant patchwork missed while flying over. Here’s some images from Swimming:
I’m hoping to nudge this one to completion by the time teaching starts again March 1. Or at least be real close to finished. (Paintings by Marjorie Mikasen.) [*]
Meantime there’s also two others taking form. One is PICOLLI MIRACOLI, a portrait of a kind of my daughter Clara (Villaverde Cabral) Jost’s first three and a half years of life. During that time I more or less raised her alone, while her mother, Portuguese director Teresa Villaverde, tended to making several films. Os Mutantes , delayed during the pregnancy, she went off two weeks after Clara’s birth to research, find sets, and prepare. Teresa’s films are Euro-art films, made with public money, with budgets around 1.5 to 2 million Euros. To say they are industrial scale films, requiring the usual work hours found in such things. For all practical purposes she was tied up with the film, in Lisbon, elsewhere in Portugal, and then editing in Paris, for the next 18 months. I took care of Clara, 24/7 the entire period. Afterward Teresa was off to festivals and post-making matters, and it was more of the same. And then Teresa commenced her next, Agua e Sal, in which she’d cast Clara in a small role. On Nov. 2, 2000, when Agua e Sal was almost finished shooting, Teresa kidnapped Clara from our home in Rome, taking her to Portugal where for a while she went into hiding. The next month, in December Teresa started editing the film (12 hour day type stuff) and dumped Clara off in a new and unfamiliar school, including after hours things so she could carry on editing. I can’t read scripts, and while I had tried with this one, it bored me within two pages, so unfortunately I put it down, and later acceded to Teresa’s request to cast Clara in the film – as it turns out in the role of a child kidnapped by her mother in a family breakup story. Teresa, for film business reasons (lost an actor for a while to another film production) hadn’t yet shot the kidnap sequence in November – which on paper required a fight, crying child in mother’s arms, etc. – so she shot that with the freshly actually kidnapped Clara in January, despite my effort to legally block it. This is a long, gruesome story which, among other things, will be covered in Paginas para Clara, a new blog I’ll be starting for her. All of which is to say that getting around to facing PICOLLI MIRACOLI has been a long time coming, though merely looking at the material renews the utter devastation and pain which was mine in the immediate period and the 3 years after the kidnapping. The few contacts I was able to have in the period December 2000 to August 2001, showed only the ravages which were inflicted on Clara in the process. Having been her full-time parent for her first three and a half years I was psychologically her mother far more than Teresa was. The rupture of losing that, for Clara, was devastating. I imagine the wounds, and probably the behavior that created that damage, have not changed. Since August 2001 all contact (rejecting of Christmas and birthday letters) or even knowledge of where Clara lives has been blocked from me by Teresa Villaverde, her family, and the Portuguese “children’s” courts. In Paginas para Clara she’ll be given the whole story of her life, so far as I know it. She is now almost 12, and at an age where she is likely using the internet, and will at some point wonder who her father was, and begin to look for information. It will be provided. And I hope to finish her film – from which I hope to keep all sadness from leeching in from these now many post 3 and a half years events.
Lisbon, 1996
March 27, 1997, Clara’s Birthdate
October, 2000
This work – editing these images, which requires recalling this life – is, need one say, most painful and difficult, and demanding the most delicate of sensibilities to avoid inflicting damage on what was so beautiful and wonderful and joyous, and yet which, through the agency of Teresa Villaverde, brought such pain, upon myself, and upon Clara. It has been some years now that this material has sat awaiting me, years during which I have glanced at it, and put it back away for lack of knowing how to cope with the emotions stirred, and in turn the aesthetic and moral/ethical responsibilities implicit in making something of it. I think – though I am not completely sure – that the moment has arrived where I can do this properly, and as well I am being pressed by nature’s clock. I think I owe it to Clara to finish this which was so terribly interrupted. I’m hoping to get this done by sometime this summer.
[In case, by chance you should happen upon this, dearest Clarinha, know that through this all I have loved you. I hope our lives are such that in due time - perhaps not too long from now - we can meet again and share our lives as we should have shared the last 8 years.]
The other work is to try to bring some order and coherence to some 12 hours of material shot in Lisbon in the period 1996-98, while living there – most of it while awaiting Clara’s arrival. I had much more, but culled it down to 12 hours of good imagery, and now must wring it down to 2 hours or less. The tentative title will be Imagens de uma Cidade Perdida (Images of a Lost City).
Whether these images will come together and make a film, I am unsure. What I am sure of is that it will take some judicious use of music, perhaps some voice-over or text-over from Portuguese poetry, literature, history. Not sure.
And then, more pointedly, one might ask in these days, just what might the point be at all? This past week a little e-mail came in from Jim Stark, long ago early producer for Jim Jarmusch, who I wanted to have meet a very young and very good Korean filmmaker friend, Dahci Ma, who was in New York to pick up her first prize at the Dance Film Festival held at Lincoln Center. Her film, Mysteries of Nature, is a wonderful work. As is another I saw, Nevertheless. She’s 21 ! Jim wrote me that he wasn’t taking anything new on, and that the market for his kind of independent film (like Factotum with Matt Dillon) had completely disappeared. I had to respond that mine had evaporated a decade and a half back…. Thus, faced with this reality – that there’s not a dime to be made with all this work, and likewise it seems even festivals are bending toward the more commercial, to fill their seats with warm paying butts - why bother? Or perhaps less philosophically and more pragmatically, how can you afford to bother?
Of course for me it’s a rhetorical question as at least for the moment I have an income, and the investment is mostly time – lots of it – and not much money. The films I’m working on now all were time-and-a-hundred-bucks films, as have been most of the things I’ve done since DV arrived in 1996. For me digital video was an opening to expand the range of what I do, to do more of it, to practice my craft and art as one ought to be able to do, rather than sitting or running around, looking for the money to work. Counterpoised though has been the cultural change in which such concerns as mine have been devalued to nothing, while blatant commercialism has been elevated into the sine qua non of our existences. No money-making, no point. So we plow ahead, apparently pointlessly.
[*] Also made in Lincoln in the same period, 2006, was the recently completed narrative fiction Parable.
Jostled by Pope Gregory in 1582, we shall not, this year of 2009, following the dictum
Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100; the centurial years that are exactly divisible by 400 are still leap years. For example, the year 1900 is not a leap year; the year 2000 is a leap year,
be leaping. Rather we will trudge, trailing in our wake the dismal offal of the millennium’s inauspicious beginning, from the fraudulent if costly alarums of WK2, wherein doomsday was imagined in the errant programming of myriad computers, and on to the equally fraudulent election in the USA of George W. Bush, ensconced on the throne of alleged democratic power by a Supreme Court intervention of a decidedly undemocratic kind, thus turning the Presidency over to the man who secured fewer popular votes than the losing party, and fouling the political waters for the coming years. Hot on the heels of this ascension the mystic numbers 911 arrived, no irony intended that it is the usual emergency telephone shortcut in America, and whatever one’s intuition’s about just how this occurred (mine conclude it was in some manner a distinctly inside job, the investigation of which thus far has left far too many oddities for mere coincidence) this in turn led rapidly to an ideological hysteria which permitted the American Right to cram, or attempt to do so, its values into every nook and cranny of the social-political-economic and ethical landscape. In the name of the victory of so-called Western values over those of Communism, summarized by the collapse of the former Soviet Union, a triumphalist America pigged out, convinced that the Wall Street Way of uber-capitalism, out-sourcing, globalizing, and all the other buzzwords of the corporate masters was indeed the wave of the future. Neo-cons, tucked away in their “think tanks” theorized away, imagining a veritable epoch of American hegemony, uncontested by any other parties, a time in which so-called American values could be imposed globally – American hamburgers, democracy, and economic models dished out, of course in the classic American manner, for the good of the recipients (whether they liked it or not). Evangelicals, courted for their electoral clout, tagged along, dreaming of imposing a reign of their mode of Christianity across the national spectrum. 911 emboldened this view as the world quickly, if briefly, lined up in sympathy, and to the Yankee ear the logic of necessity rang clear: we gotta ‘tack them there before they ‘tack us here, went the Bushian mantra. Along with the other fanciful think-tank palliatives like “democracies never go to war with each other,” and “trading parties never go to war with each other.” It was America uber alles because it was good for us, and if it was good for us it was good for them.
And so, following W’s lead, we twisted the evidence where needed, and marched gloriously off to war, without the usual annoyances of a draft or the raising of taxes. All that was required of us was “go shopping,” run up the credit card, submit to a cyclical fear-amperage boost and forget about war crimes.
Yellow.
Orange.
RED !
Shop and be afraid.
For a while Americans, or some Americans, even a majority of them, were taken with this new American Imperial vision in which GI’s would traipse around the world’s bad nabes, and do in the bad guys over there while we all partied over here. Even when the hidden bodies began to return home, and the Mission Accomplished soured, and the deal of having the war paid for by Iraqi oil, and all the other think-tank pipe dreams began to curdle in smoke, there was still the booming housing market to buoy things along, and run up the credit card a bit longer. And W won his next lost election, scamming his way to another four years on the claims of being a heroic cod-pieced War Presidentsmokin’ ‘em out. Back in 2004 his popularity rating was still in the 60% range, the economy was seemingly cooking, and Katrina had not yet arrived to show that the show was, well, all show, and that bin Laden, the bad guy, might or might not be alive and laughing.
Here Sam Mendes, of the UK, not US, stands with his wife Ms Winslet, preparing a shot for Revolutionary Road, based on a dyspeptic novel of the 1950’s of the same title, taking to critical task the imaginary Nirvana of upper-end suburbia. Reviews suggest the film has “high production values/classy set design” and some good acting, though there doesn’t seem to be any accord that it is actually a good film. One look at this production still, not really greatly different from most production stills, shows the fundamental problem, which reverberates down through the fraudulent sets of Hollywood, on through the multiplex and right across the nation to settle in the dual cesspools of Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, Wash., DC. The problem is an essential fakeness of such insidious qualities that more or less all involved don’t see that everything around them, as well as the image in the mirror, is indeed fake. Fraudulent. Phony.
Above, as Mr Mendes counsels Kate about the next shot, we see a crew standing about, holding an umbrella to keep the actual sun from searing our starlet’s blond tints. The lackey, doubtless making $500 or more a day, stands in spotless sneakers, as spotless as the never-worn-but-on-the-set costume of Ms Winslet, all in pristine unsmudged whites, lacking any evident rumples of life. Around them the scrims and diffusion screens and high wattage lights, on a perfectly fine looking sunny day, belie the core falsity of Hollywood, just as do the costumes and the movie-biz pay scales. The trades say the film cost (”a relatively low-budget”) $45,000,000 so we may assume that Mr Mendes and wife picked up a handy 5-10 million between them, while the other stars perhaps got less than their usual, and all the regular Hollywood sorts from DOP to grips got their customary $500-$5,000 a day, plus out-of-town housing, per diem, etc., for their ever so specialized labors. For sure none of the parties involved felt the slightest sense of hypocrisy while the two leads tore at each other acting out the dismal story-line. Rather they doubtless felt they were engaged in a serious piece of socio-critical art, with a “serious” director, and that whatever the critiques laid out for Connecticut suburbia circa 1955, they applied not at all to these denizens of Beverley Hills, Santa Monica or whichever hip enclave in New York, London or Santa Barbara they all call home. Revolutionary Road is but one rather minor film in the parade of equally morally squalid “product” which spills out from Hollywood, never mind the massive toilet of television. Of course, this business is all considered perfectly normal, part of the cultural swirl which is America. In this particular world, we’re all American Idols.
However fraudulent, in the last decades has come the complaint from Hollywood that the money-changers have taken over the biz, that bean-counters have replaced those enamored of the movies, and it’s been a downhill skid ever since. This was said as Wall Street souls had entered the inner sanctums of the studios, buying up (along with Sony) the fabled MGM, Warner Brothers, and Paramount. Filthy numbers had replaced the less tangible matters of art, and the good old Hwd had been bought like a whore. Laughable as this lament may have been, indeed the hyperized pressures of the new capitalism have in fact left a lot less space for the quirky emergence of anything like art, and have replaced them with a quasi-scientific attempt to quantify every aspect of this most commercial of businesses. But, the numbers did indeed shoot up, and the cost of making, marketing and exhibiting a film have leapt, along with the pay-scales of nearly all attached to the enterprise. Alas, this ballooning scarcely measures next to that of Wall Street, where CEO’s whose names fail to register on any marquee, are accorded payment which dwarfs that of any hot Hollywood star, or even the entire budget of a carefully calculated mega-monster BO buster. Compared to their brethren in New York, the moguls of LA are decidedly minor league.
(Enter Henry “Hank” Paulson, stage Right)
In the autumn of 2008, as the cumulative fraud of the United States’ economy unveiled itself as an Enron scam exponentially beyond any recognition, Henry Paulson, US Secretary of the Treasury, former CEO of Goldman Sachs (where he picked up a mere $700 million for his labors – to say for his involvement in the development of those exotic fiscal Ponzi schemes called “derivatives,” – not to mention his extra departing bonuses as he moved on to Federal service) announced that despite his not so long ago assurances (January 2008) that “the fundamentals of the US economy were sound,” that instead he was Chicken Little and The Sky Was Falling. He demanded that he be given a mere $700 billion to pass out to his errant banking buddies, and that under no circumstances should there be any accounting or even any manner in which to account for this, otherwise he sagely said, The Sky Will Fall. After some modest negotiation with an ectoplasmic Congress, this deal was cut and he was duly given his $700 billion, to pass out ostensibly to grease the fiscal system to loan again, though in fact this did not occur. Instead the systemic freeze on loaning money remained gelid, and at least $350 billion went somewhere, unaccounted, into the vaults of – would you have ever guessed? – Goldman Sachs, and other banks and fiscal entities such as American International General, all of which had Ponzi’ed themselves into a deep accounting negative, playing mostly with the vaunted “derivatives” – debt sold as a positive value – which had not panned out. Pity the poor bankers. Being who they were they didn’t imagine that holding half-million dollar parties with the Federal bailout funds while “folks” were being evicted from their foreclosed homes would be anything but normal, and hardly could they imagine any shame attached to such behavior. So party they did. Now some months have passed, and while billions have been printed and shoved in the hands of those who provoked this crisis, little has changed (well, except that the banks refilled their coffers and party funds, and some million or so lost their jobs, and some 100,000’s lost their homes, and….) and the sky has not yet fallen, though it threatens to do so any moment. Those august persons in authority again admonish us:
Shop and be afraid.
As the house of cards which is America begins to shudder in the breeze, there is a sudden arrival of accounting. The pundits of the press and the television talking heads all rush in to analyze the problems besetting us, each and every one side-stepping their role in setting up exactly those problems. Those who cheered on a tax-cut and a draftless war (more or less all of them) now lament a lazy you-want-something-for-nothing public which fell for this line. Not them, of course. No, their public wisdoms are meant to evaporate with the morning dew, each day providing a virgin canvas for new visions never accountable to the thoughts of the past. Thomas Friedman is an exemplary of this tendency, who having energetically cheered on the illegal invasion/occupation/war in Iraq, was a major Bush booster, then went on to applaud globalization and all its effects (outsourcing, down-sizing), now stridently insists we need to re-boot America – the economy, our politics, our morals, ethics, etc. etc. – as if he had had nothing whatsoever to do with our slurping in the troughs of corruptions of all kinds. He represents the tonier end of such sentiments, but has many with whom he shares company.
And so America, having preached the virtues of honesty, democracy, and proper ethics, etc. to those abroad – even if we never practiced it at home – has now fallen into the depravity of the worst of corruptions of all kinds – political, economic, ethical, moral. We are a nation of torturers, of thieves in pin-stripes (or surely some other costume these days), of Elmer Gantry’s who preach and wantonly fuck, and of ordinary people who think glamor is properly rewarded with millions and only lament that they are not in on the take. We trundle to Vegas thinking it our due that the wheel of fortune should shine on us, even if we have done nothing whatsoever to deserve it outside putting a chip on red or black. We send our sons and daughters to universities of costly kinds and expect they should get an A across the board even if they have only narcissistically filled their Facebook with imaginary friends and never learned how to spell or count. We partake of a thoroughly corrupted system and cannot imagine that we ourselves are stained. We are “the good Americans” and now, as Bush prepares to take his leave, Obama will absolve us all, and everything will magically be OK.
But it won’t.
The fraud of our culture is reflected in the films of Hollywood, in its phony light which we have long acknowledged as “the dream factory,” and its output, if vaguely accurate, shows that our dreams are a tawdry kind, devoid of our reality even when, as in Revolutionary Road, imagining to be deeply rooted in it, just as it is reflected in our politics, in which those who survive its system are as plastic as the costumes of Hollywood. And those who accept this, and vote for it, compliant and submissive, are as plastic as their “wealth.” Which in these days has proven to be illusory.
Thanx to Len Hart, 
