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Suzy Says
May. 8th, 2008
10:43 am - Idle hands
Well, not exactly; but I do have a niggling new concern, and it worries me a lot. I've been reading columns, here and there, about how some people think Sen. Clinton has now set her campaign on "spoiler", aimed at making Sen. Obama unelectable even if he does, as seems likely, secure the Democratic nomination. The idea is that she'd like to see McCain win so that his continuation of Republican havoc will improve her position for a second run at the Presidency next time around.
Personally, I think this is crap. BUT: I also think that if Obama is nominated and wins, there is a great danger that instead of working with him and the party from the Senate, Sen. Clinton may concentrate on blocking President Obama and making him look bad at every turn, as part of positioning herself to run against him in the next election and take his second term away from him (she is, after all, only sixty-one -- younger than me, for pete's sake!). The hardening of dislike between the two of them makes this more and more likely, particularly since he looks set to persist in his very soft approach ("let's all come together"), which is just plain suicidal.
When he extends a friendly hand to the Republicans in Congress, they will chew it off at the armpit. Worse, if he's bent on conciliation he's not going to go anywhere near kicking out the Bush appointees that most need to go or reversing egregious Bush policies -- which will give Sen. Clinton a handy (and righteous) stick to beat him with. So he's gonna get stick, and plenty of it, from both sides if he continues to try to "bring together" normal, decent human beings with proven Republican scum, which you can only do by simply caving in to the Republican scum, because they do not compromise. Sen. Obama, once elected, *could* choose to invite wallops from one side *only*, if he were to lean more toward the Clinton position. From the White House he could turn on the Repubs and give them a helping of what they've been giving us for all these years, and high time too -- only, hard-edged combativeness is obviously a style that's very distasteful to him, and, in fairness, probably to many of his younger and more idealistic supporters as well, so don't hold your breath.
Now that it's way too late, I'm afraid that we had our candidate -- and we kicked him to the curb early on. That was John Edwards, who, true to High School political form, just couldn't compete effectively with the more glamorous clique leaders, Hilary and Barack. He knew who the bad guys are, and that they are not other Democrats, and he could have effectively offered a strong domestic focus (cleaning house after the Republicans have be-shit everything for eight years) in opposition to the McCain blather about making war on everybody in the world forever. Frankly, I miss Edwards.
Our two current Democratic competitors both just make my heart sink. Their rivalry -- the rivalry, between two oppressed elements, that the Old White Male Establishment has ALWAYS used to divide and rule in the USA -- is not going to end with this election. And that insures that the Republicans are not going to get the outspoken and focused opposition that their abusive nature requires to checkmate and begin to reverse the damage done by their rapacious savagery and pandering to religious fanaticism.
12:09 am - Iron Man -- SPOILERS, such as they can be
Even at the Senior rate for the 1:20 pm show ($6), I just could not make myself stay in the theater for the second half of this movie. Everybody's raving about it, it's making a ton of money, Robert Downey Jr. is very cute, the script is not stupid -- and I could see the rest of the story coming and was BORED BLIND. So I left.
Right where "Tony Stark" (Downey/Iron Man) blithely sends his secretary, Miss Pepper Potts, into the lair of his old pal (now revealed as a treacherous enemy) to get some information for him. Now, tell me, folks, how's the rest of this go? Bad Guy catches Pepper-lady, probably sends her off to Other Bad Guy in Afghanistan to be pressured and threatened and maybe even tortured, oh argh, so Iron Man must come to her rescue, even though he knows the Bad Guys have got his designs for his Iron Man armor and have produced -- in an instant, mind you -- multiple armored warriors to oppose him. They fight. He is treacherously captured, his techno-heart is taken by gloating villains (who have probably turned on each other by now, as such caricatures are wont to do), whereupon Miss Pepper saves the day by bringing the obsolete heart-thingie that she helped him replace early on but did *not* junk per instructions, and he goes on to cream the opposition.
Oh, and somewhere in there the little Afghan boy seen earlier, admiring the armored rescuer of his warlord-bullied dad, will be helpful in rousing the helpless villagers to fight the evil Afghan warlord who's been buying the Stark weapons meant to protect America from,well, evil Afghan warlords and the like.
It's not that this is a bad story, or that it's ill written or poorly produced or badly acted. It's just that it's the same old, same old, SAME OLD, and I guess I'm really done with it. Done enough to leave, mid-way, satisfied with the earlier, ebullient joy of the Stark character when his armored suit enables him to stunt-fly like a champ, making full use of the wide screen. *That* part had some real energy and lift. The rest is just bothersome plot-points strung together on a tired old wire recycled from a hundred "super-hero" tales (of course Dad's partner Obediah is a traitorous monster; he probably even engineered the early death of Daddy Stark, who will turn out to have had human qualms about his arms production business which he never lived to express to his son -- right?).
Blah, blah, blah, at top volume (although a good deal of Downey's dialog was spoken too softly for me to hear, come to think of it -- too softly and too fast, and what does that tell you?).
I used to be an avid collector of comics (EC, the best of the best).
I guess I'm just not a teenager any more.
It's not that I'm feeling censorious, or superior, or offended. I was just bored. So I left. And I know, as sure as I'm sitting here way too late at night typing this, that I didn't miss a god damned thing.
So tell me, someone: tell me, honestly, that I'm wrong?
May. 6th, 2008
02:07 am - No, I'm not dead --
I've just been more or less paralyzed by the worst allergy season in living memory out here in the sunny, windy, fire-ridden, generally crazy and primitive southwest. We drove to Utah and had a great ten days at the beginning of April, meant to avoid the blooming of the mulberries, or whatever those damned things do, but it's been weirdly cool weather this April around here -- beautiful, in fact -- and everything came on late. So my nose has been a solid wedge glued onto the front of my face and preventing anything like normal breathing for over three weeks now, and with sleep constantly interrupted by the feeling of suffocation (whenever my mouth fell shut), I haven't been feeling much like communicating.
More like just giving up and dying, actually, now that I think of it. But the worst seems to be letting up a bit today, so I'm returning to something like normal consciousness at last . . . been reading the newest mystery novel by an author I've come to blows with (well, nearly) on a usenet mystery list -- she's that maddening combination of *very smart and well informed, reads much and remembers much, and nutty Libertarian notions that seem to be founded in a most peculiar absence of normal human empathy for other humans.
Hmm. Obviously, I'd better not give her name here -- one doesn't wish to find one's blog taken over by a furious argument with someone best avoided -- but suffice it to say that the novel is set in a barely disguised Martha's Vineyard among the rich and crazy Paris Hilton type baby celebs who show up complete with entourages for the making of a movie; one of their hangers-on is killed, and this writer's long-running hero (whom I have avoided since first reading one of the earlier books and finding him as annoyingly smug, arrogant, and semi-blind as I've since found his originator in person) is called in to solve the crime. It's decently written by a seasoned author who has built a strong following; some of the detail of the place -- seen in winter, sans most of the idle rich who normally vacation there -- feels nicely observed, and the tale had enough intrinsic interest to keep me skimming, at least, until the end.
But there's this One Big Problem: the author is so incensed by the fame of the Hilton types, founded as it is in nothing remotely resembling personal achievement, that the book is sandbagged by cranky repetitions of this very complaint. Characters (the solid, sensible, mainly older folks who do the sleuthing) keep observing, in irritable amazement and over and over and over both aloud and inside their own heads, that these baby nitwits do nothing to earn their celebrity and wealth. Attempts at presenting the interior lives of several basically stupid but successful young people struck me as hopelessly wooden and unconnected with the mental processes of anybody in the real world, whatever their mental capacity, and this kept yanking me out of the story.
For example, the thought "I hate X because he makes me feel stupid" is way too self-aware for the mentality at issue, which is far more likely to be expressed, IMO, in these terms: "X thinks he's so smart! All he knows is a lot of high and mighty bullshit he read in a bunch of crumbly old books, but he doesn't know anything about the real world that real people like me have to live in, because he's so ancient and stuck up and high on himself!" We get the author's assessment of such a person's view of sane and sensible character X, *not* a (convincing) baby celeb character's view of X. In other words, the problem is that the author not only doesn't like her "stupid" characters -- she despises them; and she lets it show, mainly by not bothering (or being able to bring herself) to actually get in there and *be* them -- which is the author's job, if he or she has any serious ambition at all (and this one, IMO, has).
An old friend and colleague of mine recently remarked that good writer knows that she must *love* all her characters, even the dimmest and dullest and meanest of them, to make them work. I wouldn't put it that way, myself; I don't think love is the point. But you do have to be willing and able to set aside your (self-styled) superiority, moral and otherwise, and step into their minds with a commitment to actually see the world through their eyes, self-justification and all. This doesn't mean that you have to become such a person; but you do have to seek out the inward parameters of what kind of shallow, criminal, cruel, brainless, etc., character you have it in you to be, you yourself, were circumstances to have called those reserves forth in you instead of the potentialities you have chosen instead to exercise in the world. That is one of the great rewards of authorship: having opportunities to do this (it's related to acting, of course, with the audience at a less paralyzing remove). It's one of the great reasons to write fiction at all -- to explore your own interior roads-not-taken.
Here this mystery atuhor fails dismally, at least until the last fourth of the book in which she seems to develop a smidgin of warmth toward one of her trio of dipshit girl-celebs and a grudging admission that there may be some extenuating circumstances (a bad parent), so that rehab may be a possibility. Alas, by then it's too late . . . for this reader, at any rate (well, this is a very demanding reader). Unfortunately the book ends up a an extended whine by an aging intellectual about the triumph of empty self-marketing over actual worth -- which I sympathize with, I truly do, as anyone who knows me will attest. But when you start larding your stories with crotchety, one-note, impatient diatribes against what you perceive as the rot that's destroying civilization, it's time to step back and take a long fresh, long look at what you really want to do with your fiction.
And I only hope I can remember that excellent advice as I forge ahead with my own Work in Progress . . .
I would strongly recommend that anyone interested in the off-season life of the *real* Martha's Vineyard (or any such fancy bolt-hole for the rich) should watch for a soon-to-be-published novel by Susanna Sturgis, "The Mud of the Place", due out this fall. Susanna has lived on the Vineyard for years now and writes about what sure as hell feels like its real people with keen observation and palpable affection. I have blurbed her book, because it's good. And I still know a good, heartfelt, respectful-of-reality novel when I see one.
Apr. 12th, 2008
11:40 pm - a cunning plan . . .
We *meant* to slip away northward, where the spring is less advanced, and spend about 10 days in Colorado and Utah while the worst of the spring pollen season wore itself out here in ABQ. Ha. Some chance. Got home to find that unexpected cold weather had hit our home ground and postponed the budding of the Dreaded Mulberries until -- yesterday! Of course!
So here I sit, nose red and tingling, thinking about having to finally give in and lay out huge amounts of money over long amounts of time to get shots against mulberries that may or may not work long after the treatments are over . . . I, who hate shots, but also know when I'm licked. And then there are the junipers . . . ash . . . sycamores, for God's sake!
Meanwhile, we had a great adventure on the open road (and it was really open, since we set out late in March when nobody else was traveling much yet, and "high season" rates had not yet set in). Southern Colorado (though Steve's cousin was not in Durango, and the restaurant that we had thought that he owned there was in fact across the street from the one he in fact works at and has never owned, ahem), including some high mountain driving to Silverton (don't bother) but chickening out re Ouray, much higher and beyond many more tight switchback loops with snow. We were driving the Camry, what do you expect? We moved on to Cortez, which has enormous stores and way too many large motels which are due, we're told to a) retirees, and b) the area's odd settlement pattern, meaning lots and lots of houses at the furthest intervals from each other that they can manage, and scattered over a three-county cachement area of shoppers, as it were. The prize? A place called Dolores, wide spot in the road plus a couple of parallel streets, but between the kitsch shop and the raw wood furniture store we found a yarn shop with a brand new espresso machine in it, and an owner who had somehow managed to get espresso lessons from a visiting master down in the coffee store in nearby Mancos. She kindly gave Steve some lessons gleaned from the master's book, and let me tell you, espresso here at home (via gift machine from Zabar's courtesy of brother in law Jon) is now about 100% better than before -- and that's damned good.
Lady said she was thinking about moving on as the area was becoming kind of crowded . . . a sterling example of that odd breed of space-loving WASP that I had heretofore only read about in books: thin, sparkling, sharp, mobile. And you should see the library -- you wouldn't believe it! High pale wood ceilings, a big, bright space full of books with two ladies in attendance, and groupings of comfortable chairs near the fireplace, facing the big picture windows on the east side, that gave out on the local river, small but busy, bustling by. We sat a long time, not reading, just watching.
Across Utah on US 70, utterly ghastly from Green River (a "melon growing area" that Steve identified as Mordor, where the shadows lie) to the Fish Lake wilderness, all twists and turns with the sun in your eyes, and I wasn't sure we would make it to Richfield. Not much traffic though (on a road with signs that say, "No services this road"), and there was this one astounding break part-way along for two jagged, massive, upsnouted shards of shale, layers of Capitol Reef, raw and red and savage enough to take your breath away for a good long time. We stopped to stand there with our mouths hanging open, and no words coming.
Then down boring, horrible #15 toward Las Vegas, plenty of traffic now, to Cedar City, UT, where Southern Utah U. has built a replica of the Globe Theater for its summer Shakespeare festival, and the young woman at the coffee shop where we asked for directions told us that coffee shops don't fare so well in Utah, given that the LDS don't approve of caffein. Idiots.
Our goal was Zion National Park, which was grand and huge and pretty quiet this time of year. Stayed at the Lodge, walked a couple of low, easy trails (lower Emerald Pools, and a broad, wheelchair accessible stroll to the narrows, where three guys in blue body-suits and boots were preparing to brave the Narrows with spring runoff up to their chests and nowhere two walk but the stream bed). The snoozing on the sunlit benches along the edges of the lawns where whole families full of kids played frisbee and race-you-to-the-big-tree. Two nights, and on to Bryce and the fantasy of the "hoodoos", pillars of soft sandstone topped by harder caprock, with steep sandy trails dropping down from the scenic canyon rim. The guy at the desk kept using the word "quaint". He was right. Zion has grandeur, Bryce is all bizarrerie, and more transient as well since the work of erosion there is fast and goofy in its results.
And home, the fast way (it's $25 per day to have the cats fed twice a day at home while we're gone) -- Four Corners, as glum and grubby an area as the country has to offer, afflicted by the ugly, neglected look of anyplace that lives off the extraction of oil and gas. Farmington was jammed for some sports event, so we ended up in a dump of a motel that turned out to be fine -- cheap, not very clean, but surprisingly quiet once we got the roaring old A/C unit going, and outside a huge sign: "Jesus is watching you". How dull for old Jesus. We drove home in a layer of fog and intermittent snow that's very unusual here, crossing parts of Navaho country and bits of the Apache reservation, though we had to work hard to get out of Farmington, which has hallucinatorilly crazy roads and "safety corridors" between it and other townlets, which seems to mean repulsive stretches of low, poor, ugly commercial buildings, trailer parks, and blowing trash, where drunks are anticipated to be staggering along the shoulders of the road and please do not bash into them at dusk (headlights on at all times "for safety"). Depressing as all get-out.
And -- home. All's well, except the young woman who cleans for us twice a month got locked out with her pack and keys and wherewithall locked in; stacks of mail; 17 phone messages; and good, good sleep. We drove
1800 miles in three states, spent maybe $3000, and had a great time, all without flying to Europe (or trying to, on grounded AA planes).
No complaints here; I'm just glad to be back.
Mar. 26th, 2008
09:43 am - Headlines
"Japan Suspends Mozarella Imports" -- one of my faves, and it's up to date, too -- hot off the BBC web capsule this a.m. What I like about it is the element(s) of surprise:
a) The Japanese are either eating cheese, which I (perhaps erroneously) thought was something not done much in east Asian countries, where Westerners are reportedly considered stinky on account of our cheese eating habit; or, it occurs to me, the Japanese have been feeding mozarella to their Kobe cattle, to help soften and fatten them up for the tables of New York (and other) restaurants where the delicious stuff goes for something like $200 per pound). Or pizza has, once again, conquered in a really big way.
b) Which is kinda "funny" (?) because the suspension has been caused by high levels of dioxin, a carcinogen, in the cheese; and the dioxin is being attributed to contamination (through contaminated cattle feed) by some of the massive layer of garbage that has been building up in and around Naples (where the mozarella is processed) thanks to the corruption endemic in the area. The garbage strike has been going on for months, and is reportedly due to the fact that once one of the local mafia outfits gets a contract money UP FRONT to do the clean-up, they go on vacation and let the garbage pile up -- because they get paid MORE money to come around later and haul the gargantuan, rotting accumulation of trash away at last. So some Italians are sabotaging other Italians' livelihood and everybody is being exposed to massive amounts of carcinogenic junk (people set fire to the trash sometimes out of desperation, and I doubt they sort through it for carcinogenic rubbish first). And nobody does a thing about it, which strikes me as weird. On the other hand, that mentality makes the acceptance of a Mussolini-type make sense, doesn't it? Maybe "at least he makes the trains run on time" is code for "at least he makes the mob clean up the trash"?
c) I didn't think that anything could give me a slightly more relaxed perspective on the levels of corruption that almost a decade of Bushevik anti-governing have given us. Well, no, actually, I'm just as furious. And it's worth noting, perhaps, that the Busheviks have behaved just like the camorra -- signing contracts, taking oaths even, and then not doing the work while expanding their criminal operations into new territory using our money.
That part's not really a surprise, though. What are these people but a pack of Libertarian loonies robbing us all blind under the pretense that they are "Republicans" -- a party that doesn't even seem to exist any more? Bad money drives out good (that is, causes hoarding of "good" money), and rabid capitalism drives out useful conservatism (silences it, which is pretty much the same damned thing).
Never mind, the "good" Republicans (remember Ike?) will revive -- when the Dems have been in for a while, corrected some problems, neglected or made others worse, created some new ones, and piled up enough sex-scandals (the only kind that can be counted on to bring down a politician in this nasty-minded nation) to inflame our more hysterical citizens into voting their "morality", which means Republican hypocrisy returns; as it always does. It's our national vice.
But meantime, maybe we'll get a break for a while.
Wouldn't that be a nice surprise?
Mar. 5th, 2008
10:04 am - Giving Stuff Away
"Potlatch" is a NW coast Indian word for a midwinter festival of gift-giving. "Potlatch" is also a small, moveable SF convention that meets yearly somewhere on the Left Coast, runs one basic track of programming that becomes one big conversation, and has strong non-mainstream leanings, meaning an unabashed and indeed enthusiastic emphasis on the concerns of female, queer, and/or non-White members of the spec. fic. community. Its seventeenth session took place last weekend, and this year I managed to catch up with it again.
Much was given away: stories and remembrances of Octavia Butler, author of this year's Book of Honor "Parable of the Sower"; stories and remembrances of Clarion West which excellent writers' workshop celebrates its 25th anniversary this year; and (as always) exhilarating conversation among a nearly 200 articulate and deeply literate people. The panel on the Book of Honor I can't speak for, as I was busy being on and holding up my share of what felt to me like a lively and insightful conversation (if I do say so myself). I think all of the panelists had re-read the book in preparation for speaking about it, which certainly added depth. The panel on atheism (maybe we who are atheist or agnostic should be less shy about saying so in public, to help dispel the Right's insistence that America is a "Christian country") I had to miss, as I was downstairs in a comfortable lounge reading about half of my newest story, "Lowland Sea", out loud for the first time. And I took time to catch up with many old friends and some newer ones*. Lots else happened, all of it entertaining and stimulating -- you can get an idea of what was scheduled by Googling "Potlatch 17 Program.
The highlight for me was the mini-workshop that Mary Rosenblum and I led on Saturday morning. These 2+ hour sessions are called "Taste of Clarion", because they're small-scale models of the way the Clarion Writers' Workshops function: focused, courteous, good-humored criticism in a comfortable atmosphere. Mary and I had four student-authors who had submitted short stories (lunch was brought in, if you please, from a local Thai restaurant for us -- thankyou, concom! -- so that we two could eat before going to the BOH panel, where we were both brilliant, I hope). Clarion West is an offshoot of the Clarion workshop originally set up by authors Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm in Pennsylvania. I've said it before and will say it again: if you have serious ambitions to write speculative fiction and are actually producing work, nothing will give your creativity a vitalizing kick in the pants like attendance at one of these workshops (they run six weeks each summer, are not cheap, but to my mind are the best thing going for aspiring authors in our genres -- of course I'm partisan, having taught at both sites).
An unexpected bonus at our mini-session at Potlatch was a student story that was not only very original and cleverly written but a) droll, b) packed with possibilities that can be opened up into other stories, and c) so close to publishable that I think Mary and I both knew that we were looking at someone who had written herself into journeyman status: a colleague in the making whose work will in the very near future please others as it pleased us. It's always great to work with aspirants who bring some talent to the table (both full-scale Clarions admit on the basis of story submissions); but do you have any idea how rare it is to stumble across a beginner's spec.fic. story in that -- or any -- setting that's not only accomplished and pretty well-structured, but FUNNY? And it's a *ghost* story, too (and an alternate reality story, and a sly social commentary story), which is a lot tougher to write well than people think.
I also liked the balance of two writers leading a session in this abbreviated format (I've not done one of these before). In fact, I liked the whole experience so much that I've volunteered to do a mini-session at Wiscon, in May, as well. Meantime, thank you, Potlatch people, for asking me to do this, and for all the work and good energy you put into making this a real treat of a weekend. Your generosity once again created a fine mid-winter feast.
* Randwolf, I'm glad you stopped by -- it was good to meet you.
Feb. 26th, 2008
02:02 am - "Michael Clayton" -- SPOILERS
It's not often that a movie gets my heart thumping and my brain racing madly to put together everything I'm seeing and hearing and spot the connections in a complex structure; still less so a movie about smart, shiny, sleazy lawyers and their criminal corporate clients. But "Michael Clayton" did that and more. I went to see it because George Clooney does interesting (as well as silly) work (remember the remake of "Solaris"?). Truth to tell, I avoided this movie when it first came out despite all the raves. Lawyers? Give me a break -- my husband is one. He was with the same firm for over 35 years before he retired (New York Attorney General's Office, and a big fancy Manhattan law firm that shall remain nameless, before that). I can't say that I've known a lot of sleazy, high-priced legal scumbags, but I expect I've unwittingly shaken the hands of some along the way. Being married to a lawyer has given me a tendency to notice headlines about lawyers and legal matters, and to check out what goes on in his profession more than I would otherwise have had the stomach to do. So, why would I need more of it, and made-up skullduggery at that?
But -- the movie was unexpectedly good. There are no fistfights; there is a car-chase, sort of, that's extremely suspensful; and yes, there is an explosion, but no one comes running out of a fireball that would, in reality, have roasted his cookies beyond repair in the first tenth of a second. Our hero (we hope he's a hero, anyway) rushes, mostly by car, through primarily urban landscapes; he does a lot of talking, a lot of explaining and convincing, as meanwhile he delves into the mystery of why his firm's top litigator has first gone off the deep end and then died what turns out to be a suspicious death (one of the most chilling scenes of murder I've seen on screen).
An unexpectedly clear ethical tenet resonates throughout this movie: "We didn't get here (being fixers for rich, crooked clients) by accident" says our crazy litigator, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson). Our past *choices* lead to our present, which is why Michael makes the choice he finally does: to play his worst self to the cynical hilt, but in the interests of good.
I loved the spectacle of The Fixer being Fixed by a much badder opponent -- Tilda Swenson's General Counsel for the evil corp. We know Michael isn't in her league from the git-go -- he doesn't offer to bribe anybody, doesn't take up a guilty client's demands that pay-offs should make his problem go away. Michael doesn't like what he's doing. He set up his restaurant to have an alternative, but his alcoholic brother wiped him out. Being basically corrupted but not ruthless, it never occurs to him that some much worse fixers -- let's call them First Murderer and Second Murderer -- are getting ready to "fix" *him* -- permanently.
Tilda Swenson's two hit men are just functionaries -- you don't even care that they don't get theirs in the end. They're just like Shakespeare' Murderers. The hands that carry out the orders of evil masterminds are seldom evil in the same way or on the same scale as their boss, and are ultimately unimportant -- interchangeable and basically inert, unless set in motion by some one else's schemes. They have no interior selves to motivate them independently any more than to think, independently, about what they are called upon (and paid) to do.
Some people have complained about the swift infill of Michael's family background, but this materal is crucial: it grounds him for us in a working class family with decent values. His other brother is a cop, like their dad. Michael didn't go to Harvard; he went to Fordham. He worked for the good guys before going for the big bucks at Lie, Finagle, Smackyou and Kill (presumably so he could afford a gambling habit that he has since gotten a grip on). We see how far he has fallen; at the same time we can believe that in the end he takes action in a way that we might not accept from a polished son of privilege. He turns in the crooks, which means he turns in his cushy niche and his career.
It's clear that he's never been one of the bosses -- as we see when Sydney Pollack, the Sr. partner in his firm, tells Michael that the firm always *knew* that the pesticide client was dirty. Michael didn't know because he's always been just the guy with the broom who follows the parade. He's in the game and seems to play well with others, but he's really way outclassed by all of them in easy criminality, and should no more be playing there than he should be playing at the betting tables: he's not good enough at it, not smart enough, not corrupt enough, not hard enough, to hold his own.
Neither, really, is Tilda Swenson's corporate flack Karen: she's excellent, not because she's cool and collected, as one reviewer wrote, but because she's in a muck sweat of terror the whole time. Sponsored by a male superior, she bluffed her way into The Boys' Club of Corruption. She rehearses her presentations like an actress because she can't rely on natural cool -- she hasn't got any. She knows she's gone over when she has Eden killed by First Murderer and Second Murderer; she knows that if her proposed settlement plan gets rejected by her corporate leadership, she's done. Her disintegration at the end has been prefigured all along. She's a reminder to us that most authors of evil deeds do in fact "get there" by making choices out of fear -- choices to protect themselves first, everything else after. Michael himself appears to be going down this path when he takes his bonus check instead of publicizing the damning report that Arthur died for; he seems to be protecting his own interests at the price of catching the corporate villains, and we fear for him at the same time that we nod wisely and admit that compliance with villainy is the common choice.
But.
There are three horses on a hill. This visual motif is shown to us at least twice, in the form of an illustration in Michael's son's fantasy book, "Realms of Conquest", which the kid describes as a nightmare of violent, alienated anomie. It is Michael's sight of three actual horses on a real hill that leads him to stop his car, and get out *before* the vehicle blows up, that saves his life. What have we here -- a sign that we are all stuck in some stupid fantasy game of crime and destruction designed for ten year olds? A child who magically offers his father a vision of peace that in fact becomes a moment of ethical healing? I don't know; but for me, this bit of simple iconography works on a purely visual level.
See this movie. Someone was minding the store, and in these days of coarse, simple-minded exploitation on every level, that's something to revel in.
Feb. 21st, 2008
10:27 pm - Yes, I watched it
And, thinking about the genial smugness of McCain's speaking style up against these two, I cringed. Obama is dandy when he's got a script in hand: he can orate just fine. What he can't do, very obviously, is *think fast* in a stressful public situation. Clinton may not actually be smarter than he is -- she had her share of dopey moments -- but she's faster on her feet and a lot more articulate in meandering around while searching frantically for something sane to say in answer to the actual question that she was asked -- but her voice is hard, and she has an unfortunate gift for snarky cleverness which often rebounds against her.
What I hate most about these events is the clear demonstration of what people look like when they aren't interested in the questions they are asked at all, but anser by in mealy-mouthing around until they can somehow hook into one of their memorized paragraphs of platform formula ("talking points") so they can finally relax a little while delivering their set stuff with flourishes, because they've practiced each little chunk a lot. Then, because they're pros, they wind up with a quick little toggle back to the original question, which they have just remembered at the end of a tangential peroration.
But I'm an old fart; I remember TV debates run by the League of Women Voters in which the candidates could be seen THINKING on stage, in their efforts to respond to what was presented. They dared to be spontaneous at least some of the time, and spoke more from their own convictions (or at least intentions -- did Richard Nixon *have* any convictions?) and less from their god damned speech writers' scripts. I'm dying to see what you see from any good teacher doing a lecture or whatever in front of the class: some honest thought, some spark of mental daring and originality (God, who's got her head in Utopia now, huh?).
At least Obama could bring himself to say tonight that there will be some *resistance* to all that C H A N G E he has in mind, from those with vested interests in not changing; it was a relief to hear him say it, although I didn't hear a lot of a) conviction or b) practical ideas about how to handle such intransigents. He finally began to sound a little less like somebody trying to do politics in Utopia and more as if he's actually met pols who don't like him or his ideas and who will not be charmed into embracing either. As for Clinton, she might as well quit with the folksy stuff: it's a dud, no matter how truthful or heartfelt. More exact plans would be better bait, at least for voters with some political intelligence. Of course, judging by the past two terms, we don't have enough of those to install a President, do we? I do wish one of them had been smart enough and fast enough to answer the "earmarks" question (McCain is proud about not having any, how can you counter that?) by stating the obvious in clear and unequivocal terms: the Iraq War *is* John McCain's hugely expensive, useless and unethical earmark, and it's costing us more than all the rest of 'em put together.
The thing that just boggles my mind is the assertion by both candidates that all Americans must be *forced* to carry health insurance. Jesus, guys; you *still* don't get it! With gas at overe $3 a gallon and all other prices sliding upward, you're expecting people whose living standard is actually falling (and they *started* in the position of holding two or three jobs just to get by) to be able to afford to pay for health insurance -- let alone fines for failing to do so? Where the Hell do they think poor people are going to get the money to afford this health insurance that they *must* carry on themselves and their kids? And who's going to police the phony "insurance" brokers who will come out of the woodwork selling bogus policies just so poor people can pretend that they're insured (this is America, after all, land of cheats, con-men, and outright thieves from the highest levels on down)?
I mean, what planet do these pols *come* from? Oh, yeah; the planet of fame, privilege, and total insulation from real life as she is lived by regular Americans. Silly me.
Nevertheless: it was an historic occasion, and I wouldn't have missed it for anything. But it doesn't surprise me that the TV pundits are calling the results a draw. I am drinking Gran Gala at my desk, and you know what that means. I am feeling invigorated by the immense achievement of the candidacies of a man of color and a middle-aged, not-beautiful woman for my party; and let down by their performances, which I can only rate as lackluster and -- even with Obama on the podium -- uninspiring + uninspired.
Fortunately, everybody else seems to disagree, which is fine by me. I can only hope they're right and I'm just a cynical, fault-finding, idealistic jerk.
Me, at my age. I should be embarrassed (but I'm not).
Feb. 5th, 2008
10:48 am - Pay As You Go
Nice front page story in the Times this a.m.: "Economy Fitful, Americans Start to Pay as the Go". It's about how our savings-rate is moving out of the negative numbers it's been in for years, as people begin realizing that it's no longer "normal" to buy what you can't afford to pay for by buying on credit.
Well, I write "nice" because I'm not hung out to dry here my own rather elderly self. I was fortunate enough to be raised by parents who'd lived through the Great Depression, and one of them was an artist's son (there never was any spare money to throw around in his very dour, unpleasant childhood home) and the other a daughter of immigrants (my grandmother worked, free-lancing as a corset-maker, into her mid-seventies, and raised four children on her own). Since my mother was divorced and I was the eldest, I knew a lot more about our rather strict home finances, growing up, than most kids my age, and what I learned stayed with me (well, I was a teacher, and then a free-lance author who never earned much; Steve was a lawyer who started over, at a level lower than any to be found in New York, at age thirty-four in a poor State, and had child-support payments for ages -- not much money *there* either, until very late in the game). We lived on little and saved what we could. Remember "Diet for a Small Planet"? That was my cookbook for decades, along with "Good, Cheap Food" (I recommend both highly and still use some of their recipes).
There was a moment of danger: back in the late eighties, I believe. A business associate of my husband's who lived on the air of future promise but lived very well explained to us enthusiastically how he was putting the value of his home to work by taking out a home equity loan; didn't we know? Everyone was doing it! And there we were, silly bunnies, carefully overpaying each year's mortgage debt so as to reduce the principle sooner than scheduled. I was tempted, I really was; I think Steve was too. But he also came from an immigrant background and had learned similar lessons; and we never bit, thinking in fact that we might find ourselves needing that home equity loan/line of credit at some later date, when we were old and infirm and really might need it, so why tap it before the value of the home topped out anyway (not that there's much left to tap now that we actually *are* old and home values are plummeting, but hey -- )?
Sitting here debt-less, with savings, and still holding our breath, I see that it was our *good fortune* to have lived in what, in the America of our time and "class" was, essentially, an upper level of poverty, here in the land of plenty. Our unsuccess protected us, not just this time but in previous times: when stock bubbles busted, we weren't wealthy enough to have put much stock in stock. When we *did* have "extra" bucks, we'd spend them going to Italy for a couple of unscripted, public-transport-using weeks (well Hell, you could eat like a king in any Italian town for very little -- you probably still can -- in little restaurants where they left the doors wide open even in winter, probably to give the cigarette smoke a chance to get out). Come to think of it, we spent like the French -- using our narrow excess to buy good times rather than new stuff.
So now I read about people on $150,000+ per year who are having to sell their big homes, drive "old" cars, and cut back on Junior's after-school extras (which used to be free at school, but we stopped all that nonsense a long time ago, right, because why should prosperous people's taxes go to buy extras for poorer kids that the more prosperous parents could buy for their own children?). These are the folks having the toughest time, says the article, adjusting to what used to be called "living within one's means". Boo--fucking--hoo (except that a lot of those difficult adjusters are divorcees raising kids on their own, which a booming economy made a more viable route than it was in the past . . . so maybe not so much).
At least, says the Times, we don't need to fret over keeping up a consumer-spending economy (to the tune of 70% now, says the article), since the richest 5% of us have in fact been doing 50% of that consumer spending, and will presumably continue to do so, since past a certain point their "means" just keep on expanding (it takes money to make money . . . ). Let's hear it for *more* and more rigid wealth polarization!
Who knows, maybe for a little while the other 95% will learn to live well by the lessons of adulthood, which are lessons of equilibrium and what used to be called common sense: buy for what you can pay for and save for what you can't. Sorta like the rest of the world.
And how long do we think *that'* gonna last, here in the perpetual Junior High called the USA?
Jan. 30th, 2008
12:20 am
Good story about the sub-prime mortgage disaster (and believe me, that's what it's turning out to be) on "Sixty Minutes" Sunday night: much has been made of the insanely exploitive tactics of the aggressive marketing of unsustainable mortgages to poor (mostly black, and, I read, mostly female) buyers who finally got what looked like a chance to buy their own home. But one guy, talking about this to the TV interviewer, brought in something that I, in my comfy middle class cocoon, hadn't realized -- something on the buyers' side.
His wife was talking about not really having understood the paperwork and the expandable nature of the interest rate on the loan they were sold. The guy agreed but added something about how it looked like a chance to finally move his family "off the block".
I thought about what that might mean, what it must have meant to so many working class black borrowers -- a chance to move off a slum block, a ghetto block, in a poor neighborhood, with all that that means nowadays.
The scales fell (yet again) from my eyes: poor black people living in rentals in areas previously redlined by banks and mortgage lenders didn't just get fooled by small print and fast-talking, lying, commission-hungry salesmen. The more savvy among them were enticed to skim over that fine print and tune out the falsity of the lies they were being told because what they were being offered wasn't *just* an unlikely, though longed-for, loan. They saw the chance to get their kids up out of run-down, crime-ridden neighborhoods that they had thought themselves condemned to forever, and to move into houses on blocks without urine-soaked elevators and stairwells or drug-dealers lounging on the street corners with guns stuck into their pants.
For Christ's sake, who among us would have said no to that opportunity, fragile and unlikely as it was? This has got to be among the *cruelest* frauds ever perpetrated by ruthless money-men (and women) in American history. It is to weep, literally.
Jan. 29th, 2008
10:07 am - A morning apercu
I'm reading a copy of the Guardian this a.m. after breakfast, from about a month and a half back, and on the "Reply" page I find a letter from a reader in Linz protesting the demonization of those who oppose mindless and greedy "growth" as "job killers" who disdain the poor. She rightly points out that although countries all over the world have been forced or seduced into trying to join the headlong rush for "growth" pursued by the industrialized West, it is that very rabid capitalism that has created such devastating polarization of wealth. Yep, yep, nothing new here: but as I'm reading, a little light dawns in my soi-disant brain.
What if we were to *stop* accepting the crazed notion that infinite expansion is good by definition?
Cataclysm. Catastrophe.
"Growth" is the carrot constantly dangled in front of the have-nots to keep them working hard and relatively quiet: "Shut up, you'll get yours just as soon as our wealth base grows enough for us more deserving rich people to finally let you have your share." Right; and how's that doing for us these days? But if you *can't* grow more wealth and with it the promise of an eventual "trickle down" effect, then the only way for the have-nots to ever get their share of a finite amount of wealth would be by *taking it* -- and redistributing the wealth that has already been "grown" so that everyone *does* get a share.
If the promise of "growth" is gone, what's left as a tool of creating even a semblance of economic equality seems to be -- revolution.
Which nobody wants. Nobody. The rich are terrified of it. The poor are too tired to throw up barricades, lose what little they may already have (cell phones; TV; a cardboard shack to live in), and get slaughtered anyway by the government, whoever's leading it. Who could blame them? The odds against surviving even a successful revolution have grown astronomically negative, given the weaponry of modern armies.
Better to accept the delusion of endless economic "growth", which proceeds by turning truly finite supplies of clean air, water, and earth into money in the pockets of dictators and CEOs, who will become the only people able to buy what's left of clean air, water, and earth, for themselves (of course; who else?).
What a deal! Well, whaddaya want -- fighting? Privation? Death squads, torture squads, occupation armies, private armies, warlords? We in the States barely have unions any more, which at their best used to give angry have-nots experience in cooperative progressive organization *without* warlords. And never mind the example of the Northern Tier; they seem to know how to put the grown-ups in charge in Scandinavia, while the rest of the world seems to barely have any. As for Cuba -- well, what with one thing and another, *that's* an attractive example.
So it's no mystery that our chosen solution seems to be to "make the pie higher", no matter what the long-term, over-all costs.
Now, who was it who said that?
Jan. 27th, 2008
12:59 am - Wailing Wussian Women
Albuquerque has a surprisingly strange and provocative theater festival every year at about this time, under the aegis of a company/organization called Tricklock, running several weeks of mixed theatrical experiences in January of each year for the past -- oh, maybe ten years or more. We went to a performance of something called "The Rusalka Cycle", a musical piece danced/sung/mimed by a group of nine or ten women ("Kitka") on the stage of the Rodey Theatre in Popejoy Hall, UNM, late this afternoon -- one performance only.
And what a performance! Singing, wailing, drowning, dancing, miming (yes, yes, stop that sneering!) a sort of melange of Eastern European and Ukrainian folk concert (I swear I heard at least one Yiddish plaint in there), wonderful harmonic singing with a backing of one guy drumming and two women playing groaning, wailing music on cellos. There was no written program describing what was happening or giving lyrics in translation, so -- I *think* an older woman was displaced, to her grief, by a younger one crowned in a wreathe trailing ribbons (who looked rather stunned and unhappy about the whole thing), and I know somebody damn well died and maybe it was or wasn't the woman who drowned herself in a cauldron, and then there were people dropping handfuls of metal spoons on the stage --
At two points, spoken words shed a little light: that Rusalky are the spirits of the dead who haunt the natural world (I had read that they are the spiteful, ditsy spirits of drowned young women who lure young men to death in local rivers); and that there is a day in eastern villages devoted to "ritualized mourning" by women, of the dead (save a spoon for a Rusalka to eat your feast-day feast with) and of the general run of female miseries, in the local graveyard, and this was some form of that day.
The voices (using a variety of folk songs local to the area) were wonderful, the backup music (composed for the piece) was simple and strong, the performers were splendid, and I sat there covering my ears for part of the time because THE GODDAMNED AMPLIFICATION, which these voices of all voices in the world *did not need*, was giving me an earache. Out in the lobby, these same women had treated a whole waiting line-up of people to a lively song-set, making the walls ring *without* any GOD-DAMNED AMPLIFICATION GOD *DAMN* the fools who add it to anything and everything regardless of the nature of the material, the performers, or the hall (Rodey is small).
Still, if you get a chance to attend in some other city, this theater piece packs a hell of a punch even without a score-card. Tricklock is to be congratulated on getting Kitka on their schedule (they have connections now with Poland, where they tour in summer, and other foreign theater scenes). I only wish I hadn't missed "The Comedy Jesus", a stand-up comic who fields questions from the audience while impersonating Jesus Christ -- and where did they find *him*, I'd like to know? Anyway, the point is that local theater activity in this strange far-corner city in a third-world country of the USA is remarkably vibrant and varied, and it's nice to have something to feel *proud* of about one's otherwise rather scabrous, crime and corruption loaded city.
Don't abandon hope, no matter where you enter. There are always possibilities, brave folks, fools who dare to go where angels have more sense than to tread . . .
Jan. 14th, 2008
11:00 pm - The Orphanage -- SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS.
Went to see this on Sunday, and enjoyed it for what it was -- a tangled whirligig of absurd plotting (sometimes quite a slow one) loaded with luscious atmosphere and scenery, and probably not too long if you could understand all the twists and turns. This is, however, almost impossible since key bits of information whip by in about six lines of dialog and then you're back walking around in the big old spooky house and its smaller but spookier outbuilding, wondering: Wait, the kids were sick? They all died and ended up as skeletons in stored away bags of flour? But nobody says anything about how six entire orphans vanished completely after our heroine, Laura had already gone, adopted out, when Laura returns and with family and buys and moves into the deserted and neglected place planning to turn it into -- an orphanage, what else?
She grew up with those six kids who, it develops, were poisoned by a grief -crazed attendant whose deformed son (think Phantom of the Opera, stage version) they had tricked to his death. Somehow Laura has no idea of any of this. She has never contacted her childhood friends, does not know where they are or, it seems, care, although our first scene is of the kids all playing a game of tag/statues in front of the orphanage. Her amazing ignorance makes no goddamned sense; but the movie would be twice as long if we had to accompany her on efforts to trace them all, so to Hell with it; better she's an amnesiac or else a sociopath who has no feelings for the closest companions she had in a fairly unusual childhood -- only nobody notices or cares.
I guess because she's such a good and intense mom, adoring her adopted little boy, Simon, who is cute as a button and also, we discover fairly early, HIV positive from birth; but doesn't know about any of this, until his new invisible playmate, Tomas, informs him.
See, there's this ghost of one of the earlier orphans, the above-mentioned Phantonino who wears a burlap sack on his head for icky effect. Oh, and it's part of the plot, the way-back-when of Laura's days in the orphanage, that when she'd gone her little friends -- all of them afflicted in some more or less obvious way (crutches, head-hardware) -- ganged up on Sack-head, otherwise known as Tomas.
There's a lot more -- a *lot* more -- but most of it is about people not knowing stuff they would, in the normal course of things, have been curious enough to have found out about; SOP for horror, of course.
Anyway the film is atmospheric, and the actors are good (particularly the boy who plays Simon), and after a while you just let the confusion wash over you and enjoy the thrills and chills (except for a death-by-bus that somehow works by smashing a woman's face to bits while leaving the rest of her body untouched and unbloodied -- but that's the Spanish for you, they don't seem to be happy unless there's blood and gore and, if at all possible, shattered faces and gobbets of flesh). The scenery is beautiful, the pacing is odd but usually effective, and in the end you get to turn to your companion and say, "Uh -- what?"
I wouldn't see it again, but I liked it well enough while immersed in it for a couple of hours -- once I realized that the makers were far more interested in long build-ups to shocking wallops than in creating a story that turns smoothly and on itself in a way that's completely satisfying because of the perfect integration of its elements. One example of this is "The Sixth Sense", a brilliantly realized story by a director/writer who has not attained that level again since. Which goes to show that you only get something that good once in a while.
Meanwhile "The Orphanage" did well enough as an afternoon's entertainment. It's pretty, it's silly, and they had to have jarring moments like the ones with the sack-head and the bus-death so you'd have something to remember. Only I rather wish now that I'd used that afternoon to work on a story of my own, or to start doing my damned taxes, even. I'm getting fussy in my old age: time is more urgent, and wasting it more annoying. And even a senior ticket cost $6.50 (for shame; and they wonder why Netflix is taking them to the cleaners).
Rent "The Devil's Backbone" instead, or in addition to. The director of "The Orphanage" is a protege of del Toro, but it ain't the same chose. Maybe someday, later on. Hey, at least it's not "Saw XII".
Jan. 12th, 2008
01:20 pm - Glory-osky!
The Times reports today that the city of Cleveland is suing the shit out of a bunch of mortgage companies and banks charged with deliberately and aggressively seeking out black neighborhoods in which to push ARMs onto buyers whom they rightly guessed would be unlikely to be seasoned home buyers or sophisticated borrowers (since loans to working class African Americans have always been hard to get). AND there are inquiries now being made officially in New York, says the same paper, which could deliver lawsuits against investment companies that passed on their *a few good and a lot of lousy* mortgage bundles to investors everywhere for lying about the risk factors involved. Gosh! Investment guys on Wall Street, lying! Now, there's a shocker!
Of course none of the money recovered, if any is, will go to the people who got pressured, hoodwinked, and tempted into buying these killer mortgages that were honey up front with a hell of a sting in the tail. The local governments bringing suit will need every penny to make up for the massive losses in property and other tax revenues the sub-prime debacle have brought upon them, forcing the postponement of large and much-needed infrastructure improvements and the like. Unless maybe somebody finds a way to let them join such suits in some way, and benefit from settlements (because settlements there will be, I promise you). Under a sane Federal Administration, there would be suits piled on from the Justice Department on open and boldfaced grounds of racial discrimination, too.
I'll keep watching for the slow wreck, at long last, of the long train of runaway greed and exploitation launched by that son of a bitch Ronald Reagan, even though I know that the biggest fish will escape to their yachts with their millions, and the greatest suffering will inevitably devolve onto the middle and working class. Still, maybe we can finally pick up some momentum toward a return to some kind of economic sanity as the wreck plunges past.
I am NOT "wishing" for a recession or, gods forbid, a real, old-fashioned Depression just to bring us as a nation back to our senses; for one thing, the recession is already here and has been for at least a month, despite the mealy-mouthed bullshit Bernanke keeps spouting about not being sure that one is going to happen. Everybody who has to actually live in this economy, not skate over the top of it on wheels greased with millions, knows that it's been happening (I know from the steady increase of "Family Dollar" stores in my city -- stores full of cheap junk to sell to poor people who can't afford Target and Wal-Mart). For another, that was then, and with the populace divided by the virulent resentment and self-justifying selfishness pounded out on the Right's media outlets, we'd be a lot more likely to see outbreaks of upheaval and destruction from both sides.
I'm just hoping to get the madness over with so we can start recovering from what a local paper's columnist described as ideal conditions for maximizing the wealth of the rich and further impoverishing the poor. These included globalization as capital seeks cheap labor, combined with strict immigration controls to prevent labor from seeking higher wages; a chaotic job market that makes workers feel "grateful" just to have a job, combined with deliberate union busting; a war, to siphon off funds that otherwise might be aimed at social needs; and, since wages are retarded or depressed, LIMITLESS CREDIT available to all so that everyone can buy lots of stuff but prices will stay down, so people won't feel the pinch of getting poorer as inflation eats at their stagnant wages and management cuts down their benefits.
What comes next, I don't know. I'm not an economist.
Of course, they don't know either. But it can't be as delusional, as deeply unhealthy, and as childish as what we've been living with lately.
Jan. 7th, 2008
01:10 am - Legend [SPOILERS, as usual]
Went to see "I am Legend" and liked it quite a bit until it became clear that it was a monster movie -- complete with ridiculous CGI creatures that have no connection to the terrible "reality" that poor (but mighty muscular) Will Smith was confronting -- like, what the Hell do they eat? Nobody around but Will, and he's playing hard to get; not to mention the fact that rabies doesn't make you eat other people, or perhaps drink their blood, who knows? The exact nature of the monsters' predation seemed to be limited to biting others so as to make them into -- competitors? For whatever the F*(*&(* they prey on? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, which is why this is a MONSTER MOVIE, no different from any other nonsense about hoards of ravenous creatures that subsist, unperturbed, on thin air, while massively stalking the last prey alive.
I liked the CGI deserted NY (with everybody affected being turned into -- whatever-the-fuck-they ares -- there were no bodies around, just husks of buildings, cars, etc.), but was *hugely* bored by the silly, jumping- around monsters that Will is so effective at acting scared of: bleached baldies that want to chomp you for some weird reason of their own, who cares?). I liked Will going slowly crazy in his loneliness, especially after he had to kill poor Sam-the-dog (which you know is going to happen as soon as Our Faithful Friend appears on screen); but the opening car-chase of deer put me on notice that this was going to be a blow-out at some point: any idiot knows that you don't *chase* deer (the way Indians mounted on horses would chase buffalo). You track quietly, or you settle in a blind and wait for them to come to you, and the last thing you want is your dog to chasing them away from you.
You can all but see the tiny, stupid wheels spinning in the producers' "minds": gonna be a lot of just Will walking around a dead city, so we better start by throwing some fast, noisy action at the adolescent male mouth-breathers out there to get them jazzed long enough to stick around for the monster-killing part. Yeah.
So I'm enjoying Smith's work anyway, despite the drearily non-physical CGI zombie-thingies, when The Girl shows up and rescues Will, and -- oh no -- there's a crucifix dangling inside her windshield, and my bullshit alarm goes WHEEP WHEEP WHEEP. She's got her kid with her (a boy, of course, who needs girls?), and she has a gun but it's smaller than Will's. Steady lady: after she saves his ass, she makes him breakfast. He's going nuts but she's fine (well, all it takes to keep a woman grounded no matter how many crazy zombies are after her is a child to look out for, right?). She's cute and also a medical person from some kind of hospital/refugee ship, but she's not a *dentist* (but nobody ever thinks about tooth decay in movies like this, it's such a spike in your guns before you even get a shot off at the monsters, for Christ's sale). But she's thin and cute and knows how to make an omelet from powdered eggs. Then she says there's a colony of human survivors of the weird rabies/vampire/zombie plague who are immune like Will and her and her son, hiding out in the mountains of Vermont. She's heading for them and wants Will to go with her.
How does she know about these people, who have somehow not heard Will's daily radio broadcasts begging other survivors to join him although she, miraculously, has?
"I just know."
But how, Will demands to know, quite rightly.
"God told me."
I got up and walked out.
Because I knew that of course she and her son ("The Future") will end up finding this imaginary colony, because how could GOD be wrong (or lying), although probably Will is going to die heroically facilitating their escape (hey, he's half crazy, and he's black and she's white and of a younger generation since she doesn't know his music, so this connection is doomed from the git-go), and that's how he will become a "legend" not among the triumphant zombies of Richard Matheson's original story, but among the human survivors the screen-writing committee has invented.
I was so mad I could have spit (but why make problems for the clean-up crew? They didn't make this movie), not just because the author of this classic has been treated as a used tissue by the makers of this third version of the story, but because I am SO fed up with Hollywood's endless, crawling, drooling pandering to the lame-brained religious Right. Smith says, "God didn't do this, we did," as if the lady who is not a dentist needs to hear this bullshit platitude from him -- she to whom "God" actually speaks.
Loathed the bullshit. Liked the dog. YMMV.
Dec. 27th, 2007
04:48 am - social dis-ease?
Got a little problem here, and it's oh, so "modern": I'm noticing that all of my real friends do not live in my city; some of them don't even live in my country. They are internet friends, people whom I have my most stimulating, fruitful, and sometimes even intimate conversations via electronic connections. The problem here is that a) few of them are within actual, physical reach without some-to-large-scale physical travel; and b) I'd rather spend time with them than with, say, the actual, physically present human beings living in my street and my neighborhood. If disaster strikes, though, it's those local folks I'll need to communicate effectively with -- but I don't know them, and they don't know me, certainly not with the immediacy and internality (if there is such a word) with which I know my far-flung internet buds (and, presumably, they know theirs).
Part of this is about being an impatient person: I can find out a lot more speedily if an internet contact is interesting to me (and vv) and on my wavelength sufficiently for me to want to spend time with him or her than I can by chatting in person with, say, the grandmom across the street who never stops talking once you start -- and endless stream of inconsequential chatter and gossip that makes my head hurt unless I make a speedy retreat when I can't take any more -- or the surly-seeming young doctor next door to her who zips in and out in the kind of intense silence that tells you he doesn't want to be distracted; or the enormous and rather scary hillbilly (maybe? Daily costume = denim overalls and straw hat?) patriarch two houses down who seems to be running a used car business out of his driveway (illegally of course -- this is a residential street, and I am calling the cops on him), or the completely lovely family across the street who are home-schooling their kids to keep them away from nasty, non-Christian influences in the public schools.
Yep, I could take the time to sit down with each of these people and slowly, slowly establish enough trust and common ground to begin to find out (and reveal) hidden depths. But why bother, when I have so many fascinating on-line people to talk with who go right for the essentials and have tons of varying experience to bring to the table with an immediacy that's breath-taking? As a writer of fiction maybe I actually *prefer* to observe my local, physical neighbors from a bit of a distance, like characters in a story, so that I can *imagine* who they are inside.
This is not a healthy situatioin. I'll bet it's not an uncommon one, either. It's what comes of moving with one's times instead of holding out for those old-time, physical contact values of neighborliness, and taking on the new weirdnesses coming down the pike instead, in one's own crabbed and antiquated way.
Maybe I need to ask my grandkids how they handle this stuff. But of course, they still have *school*, that powerful connector-in-person, so no, their experience is not like that of older people like me grappling with the bewilderment of the new . . .
Dec. 23rd, 2007
01:36 pm - More -- I just can't *resist*!
Again, from Graham Robb, "The Discovery of France", published only a month or so ago in the US:
"The people of the Mezenc, like the inhabitants of many others [sic] towns and villages in France, would not have considered themselves 'French' in any case. Few would have been able to say exactly what the word meant. They knew what they had to know to survive from one season to the next. Some of them travelled south in search of work. They traded with their neighbors and leased their land to shepherds who brought huge, three-mile-long flocks of sheep to graze on their pastures in summer. But these movements were regulated by tradition and confined to ancient routes that never varied. When the writer Geoge Sand ventured ventured into the region in 1859, she was amazed to discover that 'the locals are no more familiar with the area than strangers [are].' Her native guide was unable to tell her the name of the mountain (the Mezenc) 'which has been staring him in the face since the day he was born.'"
I'm on chapter 8 and dreading completion. And I'm thinking about all that fuss in "The Three Musketeers" about where people came from -- how shocking it was to everyone that D'Artagnan was from *Gascony*. And also, thanks to a chapter on language(s), what it is that makes the French so ridiculously fussy about their *language*. Little windows of understanding keep popping open in my brain as I read this book. I haven't had a reading experience like this in *way* too long!
But Robb makes up for all that lost time, believe me. Treasure, treasure, treasure, people! And all for the price of a mere book . . .
Dec. 22nd, 2007
09:56 pm - In love again . . .
Gonna quote here, and hope I'm within fair use rules:
"Pagan saint-worshippers did not suddenly die out and disappear like fairies. They turned into the poplation of modern France. . . . [these Saint-worshipers were] a population whose concerns were overwhelmingly practical and whose beliefs had a firmer basis in reality than upper-class infatuations with mesmerism, astrology and Ouija boards.
" . . . Everything was believed to have a particular cause, which was either known or knowable. The cure itself nearly always involved a physical activity or a real substance. This is why quack doctors and their customers adapted so easily to the new world of scientific medicine and why education so quickly eradicated misconceptions without plunging the population into an abyss of religious doubt. The difference between the generations that swallowed Saints' dust [pulverized bits of Saints' statues believed to cure afflictions] and the generations that visited a qualified doctor was not mental capacity but information."
This is from "The Discovery of France", by Graham Robb, a vastly entertaining chapter on religion and superstition in France .
Now, I am a patsy for anyone who writes history with an understanding that our forebears were not dimwits to be looked down on and laughed at for their ridiculous beliefs and behaviors, but regular folks working pretty rationally but from a very different data-base than the modern one that took root between the World Wars of the 20th c. Robb, though, is better than just -- well, right, as in, holding some opinions very similar to my own (harumph). He is a clean, sure stylist with a delicious taste for historical hilarity.
We are using this book, sparingly so as not to use it *up* yet, as bedtime reading, reading by one when the other is washing dishes, reading to secretly dip into ahead of our "place" because there are no spoilers, only pleasures to be re-savored in the sharing when you come upon them again over the kitchen sink. Everybody's talking about "The World Without Us", which is also intelligent and provocative for science fiction writers accustomed to peering ahead; but Robb's book is for the inventor of pre-industrial or just-industrializing fantasy worlds. Here is the authentic taste of Europe (or, at least, France and, by all accounts, Italy, and probably much more) before the countryside was actually and effectively opened by modern transportation technologies.
And it's funny; I promise. You WILL laugh out loud. And you will never read, or write, fictional pre-industrial cultures the same way again. We have all been making it up, and we have been making it up poorly, because the reality as Robb reveals it is just *way* stranger, more complex, and more intriguing than our impatient brains could have thought up.
I love this book, and am effusively grateful to the many reviewers who sang its fully merited praises in the NYTBR and the NYRB.
Dec. 16th, 2007
05:40 pm - Unreal politics (is there any other kind?)
I do wish Obama wouldn't talk about "bringing the country together". The Republicans know better; for Democrats to pretend otherwise which doesn't help. It's a long time since the Depression, and a long time since The Good War. Those were the great experiences of the 20th c that actually *did* pull the country together and give it a positive sense of itself, but the Republicans have devoted half a century to tearing all that down so they could climb to domination on the rubble.
Given their great success at this, I'd love to hear a candidate acknowledge that: "Never mind the Herculean task of bringing the country together, that'll have to happen on its own and maybe it won't take as long as it looks like it's going to take. But meantime, let's start by getting the sane folks together to boot the fanatics, the crazies, and their scamming, skimming, stealing cronies out of Washington. We need to put practical people familiar with the Constitution in charge, so that they can started cleaning up this unholy mess."
The only thing that will "bring us together" is some nation-wide economic crash, epidemic, or other catastrophe (clearly, the flooding of a major port city, compounded by malicious federal neglect, isn't enough any more than an absolutely disastrous and ruinous war against the wrong people is). I can't be the only one who'd rather just move on *without* promises of an illusory unity, so we can get on with what looks a lot like plain old housekeeping: housekeeping that's been put off to long, so that the whole house is increasingly in danger of falling down around our ears.
Housekeeping like: meaningful environmental action and changes to secure out ports; repair and replacement of aged infrastructure; serious single payer health insurance that actually works and keeps health service costs down; rebuilding the worn out and busted down military *without* buying a lot of very expensive, non-functional science fictional garbage; cleaning up our disgraceful recent record on international treaties and agreements; etc etc. I think most people who bother to read the papers (and who aren't compulsively fixated on other people's sexual and spiritual conduct) have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done.
If only some of the candidates, and more members of Congress, showed signs of knowing, too . . .
Dec. 7th, 2007
09:57 pm - minor meditation in a giving season
I'm reading a mystery novel by a guy who's had books nominated for various (though I've been skimming furously through the entire first 40 pages because they're all about how the protagonist "had done" x or y, paragraph after paragraph of boring backstory -- ah, "literature") -- but look, here's what he presents as a quote from Ernest Hemingway on writing:
"Unlike all other forms of combat, the conditions are that the winner shall take nothing; neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notions of glory; nor, if he wins far enough, shall there be any reward within himself."
Well, fair enough as to the "combat" with the fearsome "blank sheet of paper" (a Hemingway quote referenced in the previous paragaph):sometimes writing does feel like a battle. BUT, where did EH get the idea that writing is about *taking*? When you do win, you win by *giving* something -- the gift of your unique, individual perceptions grown from your unique, individual life to any and all who might be interested, in such a way that they mostly won't end up thinking that they've wasted their time with you. The talent thing -- any artistic talent -- is itself a gift, and we speak of it as such; the job is to find a way to use it to give away parts of yourself, which is what it is for.
Maybe many of the artists who self-destruct before our eyes (usually after first wreaking various degrees of damage on their nearest and dearest) do so because thinking that their gift is supposed to be about *taking*, they frustrate themselves to death on the impossible task of trying to devour us with their insight?
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