American Pastoral #2

Camp Bucca, Iraq

“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.”

Nose to the grindwheel

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:

Thanx to Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

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.

WORKING TITLES

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.

Fraud

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 President smokin’ ‘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.

American Pastoral

Happy Seasonal Stuff and here’s to a better New Year 2009

Doubtless not to be published in the New York Times

The following is a letter to the editor to the New York Times, in response to their opinion page item, The Great Unraveling, by the inimitable Thomas Friedman.

To the Editor:

In today’s Times, from his usual moral high-horse, Thomas Friedman excoriates American bankers and stock traders and demands a change: “…Which is why we don’t just need a financial bailout; we need an ethical bailout.”

Mr. Friedman apparently believes in situational ethics, for on  April 27, 2003, he wrote this: ” As far as I’m concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war. That skull, and the thousands more that will be unearthed, are enough for me. Mr. Bush doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue).”

Being a man of reputed wisdom, perhaps Mr Friedman might now see the connection between the example of dishonesty and deceit at the highest levels of government in the service of the most grave act of government, to commit to war, and the dishonesty and deceitfulness of the financial community which is, after all, only following the example of the Federal Executive.

For a man regarded as having a broad overview of the world, able to gather together and bind a wide range of information, one would think this elemental matter would have been visible to him long ago.  The ethical tone of so-called “leaders” is often reflected in those they lead.

If you will recall Mr. Friedman was one of the loudest proponents of the aggression against Iraq for its alleged holding of WMD.  The greatest unraveling for Mr. Friedman is his consistent failure to apply the honesty he now demands of others to himself.

Sincerely

Prof Jon Jost

Of course to expect honesty of the man who lives in the house depicted below, who sometimes scribbles about the virtues of  “green” technology, and who invariably contrives to wrong-foot himself, is to ask for miracles.   Mr. Friedman is a bought man, like most of those who live in the world of high finance, or who wield great influence in the councils of government.  Because he is bought, he brings a high-price for lectures.  But somewhere, he pays an even higher price.

The Gospel According to Friedman (and others)

Thomas Friedman, quoted in 2006:

“I don’t know whether I’m successful or not—depends on your metric—but I’m sure having fun. Never had a bad day. Shame on me if I did.”

Thomas Friedman, columnist for the Gray Lady of New York, who pontificates twice weekly in the Times “opinion pages,” is, by any accounting, almost always wrong.  He lives in the above pictured Bethesda, Maryland McMansion of a mere 11,000 sq. feet.   Perpetual wrongness is a stance he shares with his co-columnist Bill Kristol, whose smiling face peers out inanely each week as he spills forth some form of mental excrement for which he is surely equally well recompensed.  Doubtless Mr Kristol also lives in a house of similar proportions.  Why the Times gives these two people the dignity and “authority” of space to publish their alleged thoughts is beyond me, though it smacks of establishment corruption.   Mr Friedman, who, like Kristol, is taken as some kind of “expert,” never admits to his errors – rather he scurries to attempt to cover them, taking tactical distance each time a brilliant idea he has advocated turns to shit.  Friedman was an ardent supporter of the Iraq invasion and illegal war, pounding the drums as loud as anyone.  When the WMD failed to materialize, and the flower-strewn welcome to America’s Democracy-at-the-point-of-a-gun did not happen,  Friedman, as is his style, did a little foot shuffle, blamed his hero Bush for mismanagement,  and went on as if he had nothing to do with the Iraq fiasco.   He previously waxed lyrical about the wonders of out-sourced globalized labor published an inane book, The World is Flat, until the US economy tanked in part thanks to the decimation of US labor which globalization incurred.  This is his MO, ever-wrong and ever moving on to new enlightenments.  A recent one is that now that “the surge” has allegedly worked, Iraq will indeed morph into the beacon of democracy in the nasty middle-east, which was, at some juncture, said to be the raison d’etre of the attack, and that hence Bush will in the long run be proven right.  Never mind a little unprovoked illegal war of aggression, torture, and rape of a country of 23 million, half of whom were children, which could hardly ever have posed a threat to the US, but did sit on top of a very sizable pool of oil.  Never mind the global blow-back from the ugliness of American actions there. I’ve written any number of Letters to the Editor of the Gray Lady, taking Mr. Friedman to task for his hypocrisies and errors.  Naturally none were ever published.

The other day Mr Friedman turned his pen and his imagined intelligence to the matter of America’s fiscal disorder:

“This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics…. So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made a fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so.”

“That’s how we got here — a near total breakdown of responsibility at every link in our financial chain, and now we either bail out the people who brought us here or risk a total systemic crash. These are the wages of our sins.”

In this litany of finger-pointing Mr Friedman, seemingly like everyone else involved, fails to point a finger at himself, or at the 5th Estate for which he works.  Nope, Thomas is not doubting, and as usual he knows best.  Just how he secured the funds for his 7 acre spread and 11 thousand square feet of posh property surely has nothing to do with our financial problems.  Getting paid obscene fees for lectures based on the sinppets of wisdom one has had printed in the national press, however consistently wrong that wisdom has proven to be, cannot be cited as a moral failure, nor painted as an example of what has gone so woefully wrong with America (lack of accountability?) – after all it’s made a handsome living for the man.  In his column Mr Friedman never utters the word most applicable to the machinations of Wall Street honchos who were instrumental in cooking this stew, one of whom is presently our Secretary of the Treasury and another of which is scheduled to be so come confirmation after January 20th 2009.  The word is “corrupt.”  Perhaps he cannot coax this word from his lips since it would apply equally well to him and his behavior.   Another is doubtless “criminal,” though that would require proof in court.  That the practices of Wall Street have been corrupt is transparent, even to those who lack any particular education in the finer fiscal arts.  Taking away the veil of fashionable costly men’s wear, the suits and ties, the elegant cars, the multiple houses and condos, what we have is a mess of scheming thieves who lathered their deals with impenetrable mumbo-jumbo, and sold massive amounts of debt as value.  Mr Ponzi would be proud, just as would any street-corner shell gamester.  And, like the guy down on the corner who probably cut a deal with the local cops on the beat, the Wall Street con artists long ago cut a deal with their police – the Federal Government.  In fact they didn’t cut a deal, they bought the whole joint:  Mr Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury, arm of the US Government which is alleged to oversee and regulate the securities industry, meet Mr Paulson, recent CEO of the now beleagured too-big-to-fail Goldman Sachs, who was deeply involved in cooking up all those debt-is-value hot tamales which were sold to pension funds, 401(k) holders, and others, and all of whom have now discovered that debt is not a high-interest cash-cow, but in fact a hole in your wallet.  Meanwhile for his expertise in this innovative turn on Ponzi’s schemes, Mr Paulson waltzed home with a mere $700,000,000 in pay, not to mention the bonus he got on top of that.   So, while the shadows seem to be closing in on this brilliant wizard of Wall Street, one imagines at least his retirement will not exactly be onerous.  If, in due time, it proves not to be honorable.

Friedman has built a comfortable life, even leaving aside his wife’s family fortune. His speaking fee recently passed $50,000; with his Times salary, syndication rights, and royalties from his bestselling books, his annual income easily reaches seven figures. When he’s not on the road, he is a regular fixture in Aspen where his in-laws have a house, and at his country clubs. Locally he belongs to Bethesda Country Club and Caves Valley near Baltimore.

Mr Henry Paulson, US Secretary of the Treasury, former CEO of Goldman Sachs

However, did Mr Friedman, or his fellow pundits ever utter a word about the revolving door of corporate-government cosiness, the blatant conflicts of interest, and the transparent corruption which had become the Wall Street-K Street norm?  Not on your life.  After all don’t you imagine the next door neighbors there in Bethesda are likely the lobbyists who played bagmen for this whole culture?  Is Mr Friedman, like George Will and a host of others, himself not little more than a fig-leaf of intellectual camouflage for the entire scam?  To say “the system”  has long since gone rotten to the core, including the 5th estate and the myriad talking heads of Sunday’s corporate TV, each long ago bought and sold, like General McCaffrey, a military-industrial shill passed off as “expert” and duly paid to mouth the arms dealer’s latest line, are all symptomatic of the illness.  Each day brings new perfectly consistent revelations of the corruption which is, in their favored phrase, bottom-line, the truth of our country and its culture:  corruption, top down to bottom.

Now, as the hollowed-out, “globalized,” off-shored, out-sourced, derivative-laden American ship of debt  sinks, these same people clamor that unseemly as it is, we must now bail out the guilty in order to save the innocent, since the entire system, like each of its major components (AIG, Goldman Sachs, GM, etc.) is “too big to fail.”   It was all our faults (except Thomas’), so they insist, and in order to save the innocent worthy we must save the system – which after all is the only system we’ve got or can imagine having, and which, in point of fact, is manned and run almost exclusively by the devious, the unethical, the unworthy.  The mantra goes, we’re all in this boat together.  It joins the previous one which was repeated by our RightRadio, that we mustn’t have any class warfare as the concentration of wealth exponentially narrowed and the middle and bottom got squeezed out of the national accounts.   Nope, mustn’t have any of that class warfare.

While Mr Friedman and his country-club friends will certainly be far more unscathed by the slide into depression than will the “Joe the Plumbers,” even they will perhaps begin to feel the chill as their drives to and from their Aspen or Bethesda enclaves require an armed escort as so many of the soon-to-be-very-pissed-off lumpen proletariat, unemployed and headed down, whacked on meth, are, especially out in the rural realms favored as retreats for the rich, well-armed and potentially very dangerous.  Perhaps it is time to invest in companies specializing in Kevlar lined helicopters and Blackwater can take up domestic “security” instead of rampaging around Iraq.

George Grozs

The scenario above should be a caricature, but unhappily it is not.  It is a realistic portrait of a culture gone to seed, corroded and auto-deluded.  It is the culture America has been living in for some decades now, increasingly lost in a sequence of escalating delusions, while ever patting itself on the back about American exceptionalism.  These delusions materialize in a generation or two of young people – and older, too – who cannot spell, write, or speak coherently – not just your local yokal, but nice middle-class and better college educated kids.  Our soon to depart President exemplifies this – and he has degrees from Yale and Harvard.  And just how did he get them?  Where does the corruption begin?

These delusions materialize in the assumption of many that wealth is simply one’s due, and on graduation from a university, where one failed to learn how to spell, write or read, an annual paycheck of $70,000 or more is a given.  Or on winning American Idol, or a visit to Vegas. It materializes when a parent shells out $50,000 or $70,000 a year in university tuition fees, and expects an A in turn, and the college professor in order to retain their job, shrugs and gives the required stamp of approval: they bought it.  It materializes when a business executive flies first class, hotels the same, wines and dines, sluts, all on the company tab. “Expenses.”  It materializes when the CEO of a corporation pays himself in collusion with his boardroom friends obscene fees to drive his company into bankruptcy, which he eludes with an insider dump of his stocks just before the fall, and departs with a pre-arranged golden parachute. “Business.”

Tom Mix

Another fake cowboy

In a corrupted society it materializes almost anywhere, and is taken as natural and normal.  Americans, carefully trained to believe in their own exceptionalism and innate goodness, tend to think corruption is always somewhere else: in Mexico, in Argentina, in Pakistan, in Italy or Turkey, or maybe in the precinct station in a bad part of town.  It is our peculiar corruption to so paint ourselves, ever the guys in the white hats, while we have historically charged San Juan hill, the shores of Tripoli, and anywhere else where it seemed useful, profitable, and necessary to our ruling oligarchy.  But we did it, and we’re Americans, so naturally whatever we did, it was, bottom-line, for the good of the other party: “We had to destroy the village to save it.”

Or, Wars R Us.

Our real exceptionalism lies in our endless capacity for self-dealing and denial.

To place all this in perspective, the below are crystals that were around on earth 3.5 billion years ago, and from which, so they say, our scientists get information indicating that some form of life on this planet may have been kicking by then:

Dec. 13 2008

I feel the need to post this addendum, as Mr Friedman, as is his way, just keeps on keeping on.  Here, today, is the lead-off of his NYT column:

If there is anything I’ve learned as a reporter, it’s that when you get away from “the thing itself” — the core truth about a situation — you get into trouble.

The fundamental thing about Mr Friedman is that he seems unable to apply this little maxim to the most fundamental thing at hand:  himself. In the same column he excoriates the banks and financial system, Detroit, and Kabul.  Along the way he pats himself on the back for Iraq, though events in Iraq were inextricably attached to the Iraq story:  blatant corruption and the original sin that the grounds for the war, alleged WMD, was a lie.  Just like the mystical cash-cow of derivatives was a lie, and just like the logic of Detroit was a lie.  As ever, little Tommy frantically wriggles away from is own bad bets, just like his once-hero Mr George Walker Bush does.   The biggest cheer-leader for the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq; a hyped-up proponent of globalization and somewhere if I recall properly a big supporter of the war in Afghanistan – now, without a hint of his previous positions, Mr Friedman reverses himself, passing on his new little nuggets of wisdom.

Does he ever admit he “married up” to a real estate heiress?  Does he ever mention his mega-footage McMansion?  Does he ever look in the mirror and manage one honest thought?

Are you kidding?

While Mr Friedman laments the pathetic corruption and dishonesty of America, circa 2008, he fails to notice that he himself is a perfect example of what’s wrong with America.

An Audience of (n)One

Philip Guston

Oct 28 2008

The last 2 weeks I was in the US, on a much too fast journey to Lincoln, Nebraska; Chicago; Philadelphia and New York City.  The purpose was largely to make some money, goaded by a very nicely paid one hour talk at Rowan State University in Glassboro NJ, the invitation for which arrived in an email a few years ago.  It could only be done in the autumn term, and well in advance I tried to patch together some other screenings and workshops to help cover the airfare and add to the sum.   But I also wanted to see Leighton Pierce’s installation, The Agency of Time, in Lincoln at the Sheldon Museum, and it closed on Oct 16.  I plotted my schedule to fit.

My original itinerary, designed to minimize travel costs but only at the expense of body and soul, had me set to fly from Seoul to Vancouver, change planes and fly to NYC, sleep between midnight and 6 am on whatever airport surface I could find, then to Chicago to rush to catch a flight to Omaha.  A little economically determined journey through hell.   However, the angels intervened, and in Incheon we waited, with the engine cowling suspiciously open, as the Air Canada take-off was delayed.  And delayed.  And finally the flight was canceled for mechanical reasons – some simple part needing replacement but there wasn’t one at the airport, though perhaps one was in Seoul.  Or one could be flown in from Beijing.  Some Korean tempers heightened and loud shouting ensued, while security police milled about nearby.  I inquired about getting a new flight, as staying around for a next day departure on the original itinerary would find me late in Lincoln.  They indicated there were 4 Korean Air flights out the next day to Chicago which I might get.  Finally we were herded to a bus and taken to a rather opulent Hyatt Hotel, given food coupons, and sent to a vast bed.  A lot better than the chairs at JFK.  I was awoken a bit after midnight to receive confirmation I’d get a noon flight direct to O’Hare, and all told I’d get to Omaha 2 hours later than my original plans.  Not bad.

The flight was uneventful.  On going through immigration, the Chicago fellow flipped through the passport, perhaps noting the many stamps, and asked, “You miss America?”   Not a question I’d ever had before, and while it wasn’t quite true, I promptly said, “Of course.”  Under the paranoid ambient of the times, it seemed a less than friendly inquiry requiring a politically correct response.   Got my flight to Omaha, noticing the beefy super-sized Americans boarding.  I got sandwiched between two of these guys in the plane.  The weather was clear and landing in Omaha I noted again the landscape abstracts which seem to have become the fashion of the times – neat midwest sections, 40 acres, plowed with soil conservation squiggles, making for a giant patchwork quilt of squares and curved patterns.  Slowly the old circular irrigation systems are disappearing, changing the landscape into something less geometrically rigid, as if an artist had descended on the land, making a massive earthwork.

Near Lincoln, NE.

At the Omaha airport Dan Ladely, who runs the Ross Media Arts Center at the University of Nebraska, picked me up, and we drove across a lovely autumn landscape, through the alleged “nothing” of the I-80 cross-state highway, toward Lincoln.  About a mile out of town the State-owned car sputtered to a halt with no electrical current at all, and I waited by the highway while Dan walked into town to get a tow car.  While waiting one guy, a young black man, pulled over to inquire if I needed help.  I told him help was on the way, and he went off, smiling.  In Lincoln I was put up at Rogers House, a former judge’s home turned bed and breakfast place – a lovely old 1900’s house, solid and large and well kept.  I couldn’t but ponder on its qualities versus the plague of giant 2×4 and particle board popcorn houses of maximum cubic volume and minimum construction value that had bloomed across the nation, insubstantial as the fraudulent loans by which they’d been bought, emblematically dragging the US economy into a black hole of debt.  After all, the President himself had announced it was a patriotic post 9/11 duty to shop ’til you drop.  And we apparently did, whether with sub-prime loans or juggled credit cards, or a tax-cut no-costs war.   The judge’s time would have found the present wanting, both architecturally and morally:  debt back then was frowned upon.

The other impetus for my journey had been to see Leighton Pierce’s installation at the Sheldon museum.  A few years back I’d seen his previous one, a stunning and complex work, Warm Occlusion, at the art museum at Iowa City, where he teaches.  I’d been in Lincoln on an artist’s residency, thanks to Dan and the Hixon-Lied Ross Center, and had pressed the people at the Sheldon to go see the previous work while it was up, and had extolled as best I could Leighton’s talents, trying to stick a foot in the door on his behalf.  One of them did go, and was properly and duly impressed, and in turn he was invited to do a piece in Lincoln.  I’d like to think I had a little part in it all.  I also tried to get some New York curators to make the trip out, but none did.  Oh, but now I remember, there’s nothing out in the cultural wastelands of the mid-west.

Warm Occlusion

The new work, Agency of Time, follows the previous one in creating a dynamic, active environment of imagery and sound, orchestrated in an immersive manner.  Warm Occlusion was architecturally larger and more complex, composed of 6 sizable rectangular structural columns in a basement area of the University of Iowa Museum.  Leighton projected imagery on all sides of these columns, making for a rich spatial arena into which one could walk, wandering into the area of the columns, surrounded by them, or go outside, seeing them all in relationship to each other.  His imagery was fluid, in constant motion, using his video techniques of a painterly and flurry aesthetic, in his hands expertly orchestrated.  Each column had a video loop, composed of images which included water, foliage, a woman, a stone falling from a ledge into a crevice, hands, a face, hints of sexuality.  The loops for each column were composed of the same imagery, but the editing  – in which there is no cutting, but rather invisible and fluid transitions from image to image – varied in sequence for each loop.    The end effect is to make a rich and complex visual music, with rhythms, counterpoints, motifs, and a sense of narrative drive, however abstract, recurring in different manners and times.  Coupled with the subtle “concrete music” of actual recorded sounds, likewise carefully composed, orchestrated and dispersed by multiple speakers, the total effect was to surround one in a rich embrace that hinted at narrative drama, while washing one with a languid sensual experience which evoked deep feelings, though as in good poetry, one could not really define these but only feel them.   I spent several hours on two visits to this installation, wandering between the columns of imagery, swimming in a 3-dimensional field of sight and sound, or sitting to the side, prompted to piece together the structural elements at play, all the while enticed and drawn into my own memories.  They were hours well spent and reverberate still within me.

In the past years, as I have made some installations myself, I have gone out of my way to see what installation work I could, managing to see some of the more major names – Bill Viola, Douglas Gordon, Doug Aitkin, Bruce Nauman, Gary Hill, Tony Oursler, Shirin Neshat, and a mess of others whose names dissolved as fast as their “work.”  Frankly most such installations are appalling for their pretentiousness (Viola), or for their student-level ideas and execution which it is imagined escalates to “art” with multiple screens, or in installation art speak, “channels.”   Like most video installation viewers, I tend to look for 30 seconds or a minute and leave, even if the note at the entrance says it lasts 30 minutes.  Or want to leave – out of a perverse sense of duty I stay sometimes longer, though departure usually makes more sense.  Leighton is operating leagues beyond any of these as an artist and his work compels staying, looking again, and does not exhaust itself in a moment, nor leave a curdled sourness in the mind.  That his installations have only materialized in the alleged cultural desert of the Midwest tells something about the corroded state of America’s art culture of the times.  New York and Los Angeles prefer Koons and Barney, makers of crass spectacle, rather than the nuance and subtlety of genuine art.

With Agency of Time, Leighton has continued a realm explored in his recent single screen work #1, a work of intense and elusive richness, also in his fluid painterly manner, but despite its seemingly simple formal qualities, complex and ripe with a passionate sensuality.

#1

Here again is a work which flickers between almost pure abstraction and a musically-rooted sense of narrative, with evasive imagery suggestive of life at its most ripe and sensual extremes.  This work pulses with a beauty which calls forth agape, its formal structure pointing to the realm of icons, though in Leighton’s work this sense of religiosity also clearly extols and celebrates sex and sexuality, however visually veiled and discreet he makes it.

Agency of Time

Agency of Time is composed of three very wide-screen (32 x 9 ratio) images, arrayed in line on a wall; before it, in the center of the 3 screens, stands a vertical column, perhaps 8 feet distant, its sides approximately the same 32 x 9 ratio.   As in Warm Occlusion, the imagery is fluid, and each screen re-works the same imagery, its order shifting, though maintaining a basic commonality in its sequential flow.  The pace here is much quicker, and the three screens are unified by the recurrent circling movement of the camera work, cycling through images of an old stone cube-shaped fountain, foliage, a tree in a field, water, old stone stairs, a carved and weather-worn stone bench, a tunnel-like passageway leading to the sea, a woman walking through a field, through the tunnel, on the ground, a red glove.  In fleeting images one can see the profile of a breast, perhaps the pubic region, a face.  All these elements are orchestrated nimbly, moving so fast that we can gather an impression and a sense of narrative movement, but such that it is difficult or impossible to trace them before they’ve rushed away, supplanted with new imagery in a flurry of color and motion.  Aesthetically it is exquisite, ravishing in its beauty; ripe and sensuous in its feeling.  Likewise the soundtrack is lush, composed of natural sounds, distant bells, the rustle of grasses, the pulse of the sea.  These three screens and their interplay with each other make for such a dense and enticing play that the vertical column for me became a slight annoyance, distracting and seemingly unnecessary.  The imagery on the column – a man standing with clouds rushing by, the stone steps – made a narrative sense, implying a kind of journey, the man gazing toward the woman, but it lacked the aesthetic force of the 3 panels on the wall.  It felt as if Leighton thought the concept of an installation required it, and perhaps the sculptural nature of Warm Occlusion seemed to call again.  However, while far simpler than the previous work, Agency of Time seems more actively engaging, pulling one in with its fluid energy, its quick movements, and its elusive sense of drama, almost a hint of a thriller buried in its thicket of suggestive images.

I spent more than two hours in two days with it.   The second day I was accompanied by Blake Eckard, a friend from Stanberry Mo., and by his own definition a “simple country-boy.”  He makes 16mm films, regional in content – about places like Stanberry (pop. 1136).  He came reluctantly, having seen a few of Leighton’s short videos and not liking them.   On entering I saw him immediately drawn in, and watched as he was clearly seduced, moving from screen to screen, stepping back to grasp them all.  He stayed 90 minutes and came out changed and deeply impressed.  He’d never seen an installation before – fortunately or perhaps unfortunately he started with the very best !

Stanberry, Missouri

In Lincoln I had an evening screening at the Ross, with bad timing, the show on an empty autumn break-time campus.  15 people showed, half the people in the unfinished film, SWIMMING IN NEBRASKA, which I was showing as a work-in-progress.   Though frankly I doubt many others would have shown up if the university had been in session: they’d all be beering up for the BIG RED game on Saturday.  The other film was a sneak preview of PARABLE, which was shot in/around Lincoln in 2007, as was SWIMMING.  Also showed AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD [NEBRASKA], an installation work.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

Swimming in Nebraska

Parable

Swimming in Nebraska

My trip then took me on to Chicago, for a show at FACETS, a long-time institution for the showing and distribution of independent-experimental-foreign films.  Its catalog is huge and has for some decades made available works from around the world which, alas, would likely otherwise be unavailable.  I screened OVER HERE to a small but appreciative audience.  Small as in 15 or so. And then, after a quick visit with a handful of old Chicago friends, it was on to Philadelphia, and a one hour talk at Rowan State University in Glassboro NJ, before a full room of students, young mostly and looking like escapees from the Simpsons.  They were all film and media students, whom I’d been told were looking for the fast track to fame and fortune, as seems endemic these days.  I calmly and good spiritedly disabused them of this notion, suggesting that even if they first learned how to make films well, fame and fortune were likely to elude them, as it does 999 of every thousand who think the media is the sure route to such.  I suggested they were putting the cart before the horse, and that if they were really interested in film as a craft and/or an art, they needed first to learn the trade.  The F&F might follow suit if they did that first, though not very likely.  Otherwise I suggested American Idol might be quicker.

And then, in this whirlwind tour, it was on to the Big Apple, NYC, and a screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in the Walter Reade cinema, smack dab in the heart of the cultural navel of the nation.  They have really excellent projection, and I presume a mailing list of thousands, and a potential audience of at least a modest fraction of the city’s 9 million souls.  There were, again, about 15 people.   The next day did a workshop at Millennium, followed with a screening in the evening – to less than 15 souls.

Which brings one to ponder just what is the point of trying to make films such as mine, or in Leighton’s case, installation works, in a time in which whatever we invest in them in skill and passion and experience, in our culture, deemed unworthy of a glance, all while mass spectacle such as football or other “boys and their balls” events, draw millions with ease.  Or pure unmitigated crap on TV sucks in viewers willing to be pummeled with stupidity and advertising breaks at a mile a minute.  While I have never really given any serious consideration to having an audience, and have always accepted my place far on the margins not only of the larger culture, but even the “arts world” one, I must admit it rankles a bit to find oneself in a near empty cinema, screening to a fistful of people, while outside the door the hurly-burly of life swarms on, with inane “entertainments” serving to distract and warp the soul.   Not so long ago, while scarcely competitive with the commercial business of film, there was a little pocket of interest, sustained by art houses and museums, and supported academically and in the critics notices in the papers, and back then I might have had 100 or 150 at the Walter Reade.  But no more.  A large part of this is directly addressable to the triumph of the Market Economy ideology in the US and elsewhere, an ideology which functions not only intellectually but also in the most tangible of ways.  To say it is an ideology in which the most important value is money, its making and spending, and anything which fails to acknowledge this value system is simply brushed aside as worthless.  Hence Hollywood makes films almost scientifically calculated (or they wish it were so) to make money, appealing to the broadest monied common denominator, cynically using whatever tried and true props (famous fantastically paid good looking stars; sex, violence, etc.) work to draw an audience that will pay $10 for the thrill.  But more, the entire system is now rigged to support this ideology: 20 years ago, had I gone to NYC to do a show at the Walter Reade it is likely the film would be critiqued and reviewed, perhaps for a whole column, in the Village Voice and another alternative paper or two.  It might have gotten a paragraph or two in the NY Times.  But no more: the rules of reviewing now require a film to have a theatrical run, and the only films which get theatrical runs are, well, basically Hollywood films with big stars, etc. Over a period of several decades this process has in effect destroyed the little pocket of culture in which art houses thrived, and a wide and interesting marginal cinema was one that existed, was respected, and if you played your cards right could even offer a possible modest living.   But no more.

I am a realist, and I accept this is the way things have evolved, and that for the moment there is little to be done about it.  Though putting on my optimist’s hat I think Obama’s win, and the collapse of the economy (and with it perhaps the primary argument for the Market Economy ideology) will lead in due course to a revision of these values, and maybe in another decade or two, in some new form, a new and vibrant cultural shift will once again make it possible.  But for now I graciously accept that my work is made for an audience of one – myself first, and one at a time, for those who have survived the massive pressures of the culture we live in, and who look for something other than superficial entertainment, or pure spectacle, and can appreciate what I try to do, and what a scattering of others around the globe try to do – Pedro Costa, Nathaniel Dorsky, Hou Hsou Hsien, Leighton Pierce, and many others, mostly invisible and unheralded.

Like this newly discovered planet, Formalhaut b, orbiting the star Fomalhaut, only 25 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Piscis Austrinus.

Which is in the same universe as these, which is our universe.

Before the Fall (or is it already after?): A Collage

To Elsie

The pure products of America
go crazy–
mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure–

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum–
which they cannot express–

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she’ll be rescued by an
agent–
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs–

some doctor’s family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us–
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

Spring and all (1923),

William Carlos Williams

Sunday, September 15, 2008

In the odd dance which is America Wall Street holds its breath for tomorrow’s opening, as yet another major bank goes belly up, and one of the largest insurers, AIG, goes hat in hand to Washington begging for a bail-out, yet another bit of Pure Market Economy Capitalism converting to that old time socialism when the pinch is on.  No “good for the gander is good for the goose” stuff here, when a bank folds all the rules of the game are off, and a public hand-out is in order.   Wall Street Welfare arrives as the golden parachutes leap from Lehman Brothers, Fannie May, Freddie Mac and soon to follow Merrill Lynch (whose bronze bull seems to have pulled in his horns) and a host of others, snookered finally with their own con game.  Not that they didn’t clean up handsomely while the going was good.  But, sorry, no million dollar bonuses this year for the downtown flim-flam artists, and, naturally to follow their monied layoffs will come those of the waiters, baristas of $5 lattes, car washers, personal trainers and a cascade of empty Manhattan condos as the house of cards collapses, stage at a time.

As if this were the least of our worries, we’re in the final slogs of a Presidential election of a schizophrenic kind, with the old culture war cranked up to highest pitch.  In one corner a history-making shift, verily a black man (half black, but in the old American manner, a drop of black blood will do), and an intelligent street-smart one to boot, and an unthreatening charmer.  He’s a shuffle in the deck, though paired with a long-time DC pro.  In the other corner is “Maverick” McCain, trailing a reputation of dubious qualities but hyped as a war-hero; and paired with him in an amazing act of cynical politicking is a plucky mother of 5 from Alaska, having approximately zero qualification for the VP job for which she’s running.   De Tocqueville honed in on this over a century and a half ago.

Meantime we are assured by the aids of a President-in-waiting that the economy is fine, quit whining, while other prognosticators bluntly suggest the imminence of a full-blown 30’s style depression.  Get out the economic Prozac.  And, naturally, the other kind, for minds wallowing in bad thoughts.

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.

Alexis de Tocqueville

After the swift swoon and deliria of Sarah Palin mania, whose brief tenure as sweetheart of America has confirmed Warhol’s 15 minute maxim, we march onward to harsher realities than Alaskan caribou hunting, namely the US economy, which staggers from one imploding delusion to the next.

A.I.G. Seeks $40 Billion in Fed Aid to Survive

A.I.G.’s collapse seemed so likely on Tuesday that the company hired the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges — which is also handling the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy — to draw up bankruptcy papers.  Many of A.I.G.’s subsidiaries have drawn down on their credit lines, people briefed on the matter said.

Shares in A.I.G. rebounded sharply after speculation arose that the Fed had changed its mind, closing at $3.75 on Tuesday, down 17 percent. They had fallen more than 60 percent earlier in the day, and have plummeted nearly 94 percent over the past 12 months.

Fed to Give A.I.G. $85 Billion Loan and Take 80% Stake

As if to give away too much, we note the AIG sought a loan (never to be repaid, of course, but these days who is to quibble about such things if it is in fact public money) of a mere 40 billion but after a few days of haggling was given only a modest $85 billion.   Of course compared to the cumulative debt load of Uncle Sam 9.7 trillion, so what’s a little more debt piled on your grandchildren’s backs.  For a tid-bit more of what this means, here’s a paragraph from Wikipedia:

As of September 2008, the total U.S. federal debt was approximately $9.7 trillion^[2], about $31,700 per capita (that is, per U.S. resident). Of this amount, debt held by the public was roughly $5.3 trillion.^[3] If, in addition, unfunded Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, etc. promises are added, this figure rises to a total of $59.1 trillion.^[4] In 2007, the public debt was 36.9 percent of GDP ^[5], with a total debt of 65.5 percent of GDP.^[6] The CIA ranked the total percentage as 26th in the world.^[7]

Below is perhaps a metaphor of your particular sweet hereafter, though one might want, in cartoon style, to place a little label on the water, saying “debt.”

Bailout Fails to Stem Global Stock Slump

September 18th, 2008.  But three days later, as the stockmarket continues to nose-dive, in New York as well as globally, it seems Mr Bush’s government is as good a poker player in the casino of Wall Street as it’s been on the fields of warfare.   While the ideologues have issued forth the usual mumbo-jumbo of the sanctity of the Market Economy in which Mill’s hidden hands take care of everything, the practioners at the Fed and other governmental agencies have leaped in to assist their revolving-door friends with a little socialist-looking grease.  Their bluffs called, they’ve upped the ante (and the national debt), their hands nervously dealing out fresh-minted chips to keep the game afloat.   Bailed out or bought, in swift order have been Freddie and Fanny and Lehman, and now AIG, each buy meant to stanch the flow of capital but instead signalling the hollow faith of the Market Economy wizards, who like that of Oz, know that behind the curtains there’s little but more hot air.  Like the “housing bubble” which is the alleged cause of all this fiscal mayhem, behind it all is simple fraud.  One lie lathered on another, packaged in complex lingo, wrapped in legalistic jujitsu, presented by elegant men in pin-stripes who emerge from the colonnaded temples of money, and, like the politicians who are their kissing-kin,  announce all is OK as they fleece you one final time.  Today, as others fumble to find the money to pay the interest on the mortgages they cannot cover, and contemplate new roles as “homeless”, we see a flock of golden chutes descending from the skies above lower Manhattan, as those who conned the nation into this fix depart, surely chastened a bit, but nevertheless safe from the impending storm about to level the playing field no less than hurricane Ike did the Bolivar peninsula across from Galveston.   Though as public resentment over this stealth debacle expands, perhaps the rural retreats that have bloomed across the nation – the gated Valhalla’s of Sun Valley or the Grand Tetons, or the retreats of Upstate NY – perhaps even these will require the hiring of Blackwater guards as the local meth-heads, driven to desperation, sense just who is getting screwed by whom, and decide to play vigilante.  Perhaps indeed Our Great Leader will find Crawford too risky a ranch and will find it convenient to head on down to Paraguay after all.

Above, Mr Bush surveys the Nation as it has devolved under his astute guidance.

Go shop !

LONDON — Against a backdrop of reeling financial markets and nervous investors, Sotheby’s and the British artist Damien Hirst forged ahead with “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever,” a highly publicized auction of 223 works, all by Mr. Hirst and all made within the last two years.

And there were signs that the bet was paying off: the first session’s total was $127.2 million, above the high estimate for the entire sale, $112 million.

In the above item, it was said that Mr. Hirst was busy playing snooker while his “work” was auctioned off.  As a businessman it must be said he’s an astute player, selling junk for classy prices to the gullible overly rich, who somehow find his spin paintings, dot paintings, butterfly paintings, and formaldehyded animals, not to mention diamond-studded skulls, to be just their fancy.

Certainly Hirst, along with Jeff Koons, is the Warhol of the day, though lacking in Warhol’s smarter graphic sensibilities.  However, together Hirst and Koons underline the blown-out decadence which is the signature of the times, a decadence symbolized by the horrible houses which were the alleged cause of the sub-prime housing bust.

These houses were selling for a million, 1.5 million, and more, and could be seen littering the American landscape from California to Maine, Washington to Florida.  Their signatures were bloated square footage, to go with the SUV in the 3 car garage, a commute distance to some city center 30-50 miles away, unserved by mass transit, a veneer of the symbols of class: Mansard roofs, colonial porticos, Greek columns, whatever could be tacked on however tackily, to assert “value” and “prestige.”  That all of this was made from the cheapest materials possible – a concrete slab, 2 x 4’s, plywood and particle board – and won’t stand the test of 10 seasons of real weather, all went to show that not only the buyers of Hirst spin paintings, or derivative hedge-fund funny money stocks, or the US government, are the only of Barnum’s once-a-minute suckers lurking in the US (and elsewhere in the world).   Not only were the mortgage loans sub-prime, but the actual houses too:  piles of sugar-coated architectural garbage built like the stocks and like Hirst’s “art” with one simple motive.  Money.

Soon enough, battered by a collapsing economy, the US will be full of bloated, costly to cool and heat, popcorn housing, rapidly deteriorating away while the streets are crammed with the homeless, the unemployed who can’t afford rent or perhaps even food.  The refuge of Wal-Mart will turn costly as well, the deflated prices bought on cheap labor and oil, no longer cheap, all fueling the long-deferred real price of things.  Caught up in a 3 decade long delusion in which reality receded from the horizon in incremental steps begetting a nation of fools, most of whom know little, want to know less, and will be most surly when their ignorance comes to hoist them by their own petards, to use a despised slice of French, though here in the mouth of the mother English’s most revered author:

There’s letters seal’d: and my two schoolfellows,

Whom I will trust as I will adders fang’d,

They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way

And marshal me to knavery. Let it work;

For ’tis the sport to have the enginer

Hoist with his own petar; and ‘t shall go hard

But I will delve one yard below their mines

And blow them at the moon: O, ’tis most sweet,

When in one line two crafts directly meet.

Or, to put it in the Biblical terms quite popular amongst the American public,

as you reap, so shall you sow.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell almost 450 points on Wednesday as one of the most stunning government bailouts in American history failed to stem the runaway fears engulfing the global financial system.

HangSeng

16,356.48

–1,280.71

–7.26%

Worry not, of course.  Sarah and her pal will save us with some black and white simple solution.  Armageddon perhaps?   Or, more likely and realistic, poor Mr. Obama will be handed a very empty bag which even the most good-hearted soul in the world could not really sort out and given the fickle ahistorical nature of the grand American public, failure to produce a magic wand and cure all ills in 2 years will beget a drumbeat of discontent and political blame falling upon him.

Investors, Hungry for Hope,

Send Dow Up 410

Sept. 19 2008

In predictable manner, with rumors that the US government, and others – to say European central banks acting on behalf of their governments – will intervene to save the faltering American financial system to which all are deeply tied, the markets today yo-yo’d bouyantly back up 400+ DOW points.  Whether tomorrow, faced with other news, good or bad, it drops or rises seems less and less predicated on any tangible logic, but rather on the desperate need of those in the game to see that the system keeps going, at least until they can unload their stocks for a break-even or profit.  That these preachers of the disciplines of the market abandon such principles at the drop of the DOW, shows how false their beliefs really are – convenient for whipping others while dining at the public trough whenever necessary or possible.  In point of fact this is ordinary everyday stuff to our sacred capitalists, whose biggest money-makers include weaponry, the only real customer for which is the government, and whose second biggest buck turner is agriculture which is heavily subsidised in a 100 ways, from cheap publicly developed water, to the US highway system, to the long ago railroad scam, each of which was paid for with public funding, and is used on the cheap by those who so readily mouth platitudes about welfare Moms and self-reliance, ad nauseum.   Now they cheer a sequence of the biggest bailouts ever, done of course by a Republican administration out to salvage their chums.

For the first time since Lehman collapsed and the American International Group was rescued, President Bush made a brief statement in Washington, saying the government would “act to strengthen and stabilize our financial markets and improve investor confidence.”

Earlier, the Federal Reserve said it would extend an effort that allows central banks around the world to lend dollars in foreign economies. The Fed will provide an extra $180 billion under the program to grease the wheels of finance.

Grease the palms of their buddies would be a more accurate description of this little bundle of help.  So much for the vaunted “discipline of the market.”

The newly-minted Socialists, Ben Bernanke, George W. Bush and Henry Paulson

Sept 20 2008

Congressional Leaders Stunned by Warnings

Yep, they were stunned, indeed.  Informed that the bail-out of the dysfunctional American economic system, previously known as “capitalism” would require a trillion dollar billing (and keep in mind this is government speak, particularly Bush guvspeak, so if they say “1″ it probably means “2″ or “4″ or….) to the already deeply indebted US government, the Congressional members stood and began to sing in unison The International.  In one quick move former uber capitalists, Bush, Bernanke and Paulson announced a coup, and that the United States of America was henceforth to be a Socialist State, in which the government oversees and guides the economy from a centralized agency under the full control of the executive.

The stock-market responded immediately, jumping 370 points upward on the DOW, as the same brokers and traders showed their allegiance to the fundamental principles of their capitalist system: me, me and me.  They stood to rake in the one trillion, continuing on with their bonuses, CEO earnings in the 10’s and 100’s of millions, with only the quibble that now the paymaster was the US Government issuing out freshly printed Greenbacks (admittedly of diminishing purchasing power, but among millions what’s a house or two?).

OK, enough of easy satire.  In making their announcement these wizards of the financial world essentially ended their bluff, and admitted that their entire system is a fraud, a dysfunctional mess the principles of which are inherently flawed and can only lead to the situation in which it is now mired.  And in turn they looked to the government to take over, shell out the money to “keep the system going.”  Of course it is in their interest to keep the system going, as they are the primary winners in this shell game, walking away with their millions.  And, should they let it collapse they know only too well that the ire of the public which would be the primary victims would turn white-hot politically and the gated communities, the golf courses and yacht clubs would be surrounded in short order by angry mobs.   Better to pacify everyone and prop up “the system” with a trillion bucks the grandkids can cover 50 years up the road.  Imagine the interest on this bill – oh are the bankers happy about this deal!  Not only do they get bailed out from their own squalor, but then they can bill JQ Public for it, just like they do with credit card squeezes.

[See this for a taste of Wall Street stuff.] [And this from NYT.]

Life’s function, as a simple nanomachine, is just to use energy to marshal chemicals into making more copies of itself.

“You need to organize yourself in a specific way to be useful,” Ziock said. “You take energy from one place and move it to a place where it usually doesn’t want to go, so you can actually organize things.”

The pure products of America
go crazy–

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.

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?

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.

Alexis de Tocqueville

[Little note here - decided to change the format for something more readable, and along the way this post has some oddities.  Take another to learn the ins & outs of this one.]

Blue Saigon

Ha Noi, August 22 2008

Forty years ago I was in Chicago, working at “the Mobe” office, readying for the convention.  My friend Kurt Heyl and I had already been arrested a week earlier, making some Bolex shots of the convention center, where in a piece of political hubris they’d decided to build a mini-White House portico at the entrance.  In another week the chants of “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win” or “Hey Hey LBJ, how many kids you kill today” would echo through the canyons of the Loop, and the acrid bite of tear gas would float in the hot summer air.  Far away in Vietnam Americans were writing their names on a dark wall in Washington, and unnumbered Vietnamese were giving their bodies to the fetid tropical soil of their homeland in what they called “The American War.”  Little did I imagine 4 decades hence I’d be in Hanoi, a near life-time later, trying in some tiny way to make amends for the horrors my country had visited upon Vietnam, as well as upon itself.  Though something in me knew that most likely were I to live so long, America would be doing much the same these forty years later: today my country – with a long list of detours through Grenada, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Guatemala, Chile and other adventures – has occupied Iraq, a country of 23 million but astride a significant pool of oil, and has laid waste in the same heedless manner with which it mangled Vietnam.  Then it was Agent Orange, body counts, the Phoenix Program and a litany of other Orwellian military acronyms which hid the ugly truth.  Today, having learned their version of the lessons of Vietnam, the cluster of resentful neo-con souls who gather around Richard Cheney, and whose signatures can be found in the documents of The Project for the New American Century, deploy what they imagine to be a smarter variant of the same programs, thinking to impose a Pax Americana on the middle-east, though transparently eying the resources that lie just beneath the surface of the sand – a policy written in the blood of now a million dead Iraqis, 5000 and more Americans (the number obscured by the privatization of warfare executed by the Bush Market-Economy wizards), and running from Azerbaijan to Afghanistan to Venezuela – wherever the oil that is needed to power the American military juggernaut resides.  And likewise the landscape is littered with the toxins of American warfare, in this instance the cancer of so-called depleted uranium, settling in for its half-life of a million years, whether in the GIs who dispensed the weapons, or the Iraqi and Afghani terrain which now hosts the residue.  The bill is just beginning to come in.

Forty years ago, in a paroxysm of violence, America turned right, electing Richard Nixon, who with  Henry Kissinger – still alive and still maneuvering in corpse-like fashion in the underworld of arms and real politick power, ever a fixture at the Bilderberg conferences – dragged out the Vietnam war a few million more deaths, only to leave in an indecent interval, helicopters clattering from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon as the VC rolled in.  By then I was living a hardscrabble life in Montana and working on a film, SPEAKING DIRECTLY (1974-5), which sought in desperation to account for the maelstrom of America in the wake of the 60’s.  It sought to explain in some manner the meaning of the sound “Vietnam” to one American, reflecting perhaps many others.  Little did I imagine what would unfold in my life, or America’s, or the world in that time.  Little did I imagine 4 decades hence I’d be doing a workshop in Hanoi for the Vietnam Film Department, trying to coax a little imagination and creativity from a dozen souls mired in a system in which rote learning is the norm, and exposure to the world is minimal.

August 27.  Leaving Hanoi, we spent a few days in Hue, site of a military feint by the North Vietnamese Army back in January 1968, when they carried out an action to keep General Westmoreland distracted while the Tet offensive was prepared.  It was one of the major battles of the war, and also site of what today might be called “ethnic cleansing” – the summary execution of governmental officials collaborating with the Americans.  Today it is a languid provincial town, with a tourist strip, and the surrounding area offering a pock-marked landscape of bomb craters to remind of the war 40 years ago, with special DMZ tours.

And then we came to Saigon, now named Ho Chi Minh City.  It’s a huge place, exploded from the one million of 1965 to eight million inhabitants (in part owing to the fleeing of rural peasants to Saigon during the war), a buzzing mix of tropic 3rd world impoverishment and hyper-capitalism, all cohabiting under the eyes of one of the few remaining Communist Party apparatuses of the world.  Across the street from the Revolutionary Museum brand new stores dangle the baubles of Chanel and Gucci, underlining just who actually won the 20th century’s struggle between socialism and capital.  Follow the money.  Down the street near the Opera House – undergoing restoration – are the classier hotels.   Not far away in the jammed streets of District 1, the signs of Sony and Nokia signal the marketplace of ideology in which I-pods and cell-phones have triumphed.  The air chokes with the gas and oil fuel of a million motorbikes.

We visited the “War Remnants Museum” – a tawdry collection of American airplanes and tanks, pieces of weaponry from the gas-fed “seismic bomb” to an M-16.  They all look terribly archaic and almost toy-like by contemporary standards.  The museum, like Viet Nam, is poor – a new building of poorly done concrete, a yard cluttered with “the remnants,” and the staff loitering about in the yard.  In one room is a photography exhibition of faded and yellowing images shot by the many journalist photographers who died in Indo-China.  The images are searing ones of war and its collateral damage, made more poignant by the fact that the photographers all died in process of providing this witness.  Back in the 1960’s and ’70’s these images were widely accessible, to be found in magazines like Life (now defunct), or each night on “the news” (also defunct).  Looking at them I was psychologically telescoped to my youth – reminded of the tension and stress of the period, of the passionate response of some Americans to the war in Viet Nam.  I was, of course, reminded of my 2 plus years in prison, 1965-67.  When I arranged to come to Viet Nam, I had anticipated some kind of psychological upheaval, which I thought surely was one of the reasons for coming – it was something I wanted to touch, to confront in myself, in the raw reality of the place which had had so much impact in my life, as well as many others.  In Hanoi and Hue there had only been a little ripple, a vague cloud of guilt, of the inadequacy of my long ago resistance – after all the war had ground on many more years and millions of deaths more.  The transparent poverty and relative technological primitiveness of Viet Nam was made utterly clear, making all the more obscene my country’s arrogant behavior, one reflected in the present election where John McCain waves his bloodied flag and his POW status as a defense for all his actions, and it is somehow ignored that what he was doing was participating in a mechanized mass murder imposed on civilians, a vast pillage of a poor underdeveloped country which failed to submit to the imperial wishes of Washington.   Adding to the painfulness was the simple fact that some 40 plus years later, my country is doing the same thing once again, now in Iraq.  It attacked an embargo-debilitated country of 23 million, half children, waged a high-tech war of alleged “Shock and Awe,” displacing 3 or 4 million from their homes, ravaging the economy and infrastructure, and killed directly or indirectly one million, most of whom were civilians.  But this time the images have been suppressed by a corporate media which is in the pocket of the government, or, in Mussolini’s terms, who are part of the fascist structure – the government and the corporations are the same thing, which in the US today is simply the truth, and the mass media are part and parcel of corporate conglomerates which dictate American governmental policy, and hence what “news” is to be.  And this time in a clear effort to minimize political risks, the military is kept separate from the body politic, privatized, and there is no selective service.  The young can be enraptured by American Idol and the myriad other corporate entertainments and enticements, seduced into a consumer landscape in which personal responsibility is reduced to the obligation to buy, be fashionable, and go into credit-card debt (forever).  Iraq?  Who cares.  All of these are clearly deliberate policies developed over the decades since the 1960’s, policies intended to permit the government to do whatever it wishes, unfettered by any public revulsion or political discord.  In the 1960’s there were massive demonstrations; today there are “free speech zones” to provide a fig-leaf of pretend “liberty” in the land of the allegedly brave and the free.

And so in this visit, the anticipated psychological impact arrived in full, mostly courtesy of the faded images of Robert Capa, Dana Stone, Kyoichi Sawada, and the other 130 war reporters killed during the war.  Though it had already arrived in the numerous young people in Hue and HCM City, victims now 3 generations later of the use of Agent Orange, cruelly deformed and reduced to begging.  Or in the chatter of an alleged former RVN soldier who walked with us on the street, who begs as well, pulling out an English language letter encased in plastic, hand-printed, detailing his past, his visit to America, and a litany of woe, which if true would tally with the treatment which RVN soldiers – collaborators with America – did in fact receive.  Or in the irony which seems to pervade the streets of HCM City, where American capitalist triumphalism seems to have won out – if badly timed in light of America’s own collapse, thanks to its run-of-the-mill imperial life-cycle behavior:  over-extended, fat, lazy, and sucking its own life and soul out in excessive and mindless military expenditures.  On one building a large sign illuminates the phrase “PERFECT USA.”   Well, not quite.  Instead America is rotted on the inside, corrupted (and not just the government, but across the board), and intellectually and morally rudderless and at sea.   The current election offers a quiver of hope, but it is probably far too little far too late.

In the photo exhibit there was a text in which the death of Robert Capa, covering the Indo-China war, in which a Vietnamese doctor inquired if Capa was American.  Told yes, he commented, “This is a harsh way for America to learn.”  That was in 1952, while the French were (not) holding down the fort.  Now almost 70 years later, it seems America has not yet learned.

Saigon blues.