The small bang theory

Perhaps the best explanation yet of the behavior of Olympic-bomber Eric Rudolph comes from John Hawthorne, whose wife Alice was killed in the 1996 explosion. "Little person, big bomb," Hawthorne was quoted as saying by the New York Times, and speaking directly to the misogynist racist homophobe (not to mention redneck urban legend) Rudolph at his sentencing he added, "But you are still a small man."

Sentenced to life, Rudolph tried out a note of contrition ("I would do anything to take back that night") that had been sadly lacking from past court appearances. Still, he addressed only the Olympic Park bombing, in which he also wounded over a hundred people, and not the bombings of two women's health clinics (in which six people were injured) or the bombing of an abortion clinic (in which an off-duty police officer was killed and a nurse injured) or the bombing of a gay bar (in which five people were injured) -- presumably because Alice Hawthorne was not a gay woman seeking an abortion. He deeply regrets his error.

That Rudolph might get in touch with the Christian principles he claims to adhere to in prison is perhaps too much to hope for (and the vengeful side of me would rather he got in touch with a sadistic weight-lifter in the prison yard) but you never know. A few years ago, when a Palestinian terrorist decided not to set off the explosives she had strapped to herself in a square in Jerusalem, her Israeli captors elected to have her speak to the American press about her change of heart. What had happened? In English she answered simply: "I look at the people. I look at the sky."

For some things you don't need a rocket scientist.

posted by Sean Elder @ 12:07 PM  0 comments

August is for advertorial

Just as Hollywood once used the dog days of August to dump movies that no one wanted to see (now they do that all summer long) so magazines seem to try new "advertising synergies" in this bleak month, possibly because they hope no one is looking. The New Yorker just published its first single-sponsor issue with Target and though reps for the magazine claimed no one would care, I for one find the effect of nothing but red-and-white-target themed adverts surprisingly monochormatic. I feel like I'm reading something sponsored by the Soviet state.

More suspicious to me is the special pull-out section in the September Vanity Fair (which hit newssstand about a week ago) listing the 50 Greatest Films of All Time. First, there is only one sponsor, Turner Classic Movies, but that could possibly mean that it was just a neat little advertising coup for someone at Conde Nast. (If it had happened at Entertainment Weekly, a Time Warner publication, it would raise no more suspicion than the usual business-as-usual synergistic hand jobs.) But then there is the list itself. Much of it is pedestrian stuff that any freshman film school student would automatically cough up: Amarcord, Casablanca, Grand Illusion... you know. Then there are the exclusions: nothing directed by Truffaut, Scorsese, Huston -- and the only Germans mentioned are the ones who came to Hollywood. But most egregious of all are the let us say controversial choices that made the list. Die Hard. Animal House. Old fucking School.

In fairness to VF, the cover of this insert reads "VF Presents the 50 Greatest Films of All Time, Plus Old School," the latter separated with an asterisk. But something about the whole production stinks. The text seems to have been written by a summer intern ("film critics have been speculating about Blowup's meaning for decades"); did VF film critic Bruce Handy really sign off on this? Did Graydon Carter? It looks and smells like a piece of advertorial, a kind of smash-and-grab that a magazine like VF, that likes to think of itself as serious about film, should be ashamed of. Instead they plugged the thing on the cover (no one noticed, what with Jennifer Aniston trying on one Brad's old shirts there) -- which is against ASME rules if it's actually advertiser sponsored editorial. You could look it up.

posted by Sean Elder @ 3:41 PM  1 comments

Neet neet neet

Sometimes tragedies can bring diverse peoples closer together. Think of this month's narrowly averted Russian submarine disaster, in which the UK, the US and other nations rallied to rescue the suffocating sailors to avoid a repeat of last year's Russian sub disaster. (Note to self: stay off Russian subs.) Or the news from Indonesia today that the government has signed a truce with the rebels of the Free Aceh Movement after the longterm enemies were brought together in the wake of the devastation of last December's tsunami. Or the way in which the rest of the world rallied around the US after 9.11...

Never mind.

After July's subway bombings in London I read a number of articles about the disaffected youth of the UK that included references to NEET, a term the British govt. uses to define young people Not in Education Employment or Training. Yes, it's lame and I can't imagine any but the most pudding-headed bureaucrat thinking that the acronym NEET was neat and not, in fact, hopelessly naff. The context was that the young bombers were supposedly among the Neetniks.

For a minute I thought I had key to unlock the mystery of the lyrics to The Damned's "Neat Neat Neat." It was one of England's first bonafide punk singles and one we used to pogo to in SF with no idea what it was about ("It can't be found no way at all"). But as anachronistic as it seems, NEET is a post-Thatcher and hence post-punk creation so like most great rock songs, "Neat Neat Neat" remains unresolved. Your guess is as good as mine.

Makes me wonder though: have these disaffected young Muslims considered punk rock as a means of expression? Drummer Rat Scabies conveys plenty of fury on 'Neat Neat Neat," even 28 years after the fact, and that kind of rage might actually win these losers some sympathy. Anger is an energy, like Johnny Rotten said, but it's all in what you do with it.

posted by Sean Elder @ 4:42 PM  1 comments

Conformity

Went to see Bertolucci's Conformist at the Film Forum last night, a theater that always reminds me of my youth. The chairs are incredibly uncomfortable, the films almost universally obscure and the crowds are just this side of insufferable. The Conformist (1970) is seldom seen in theaters and not as yet available on DVD (there's a lousy video transfer out there somewhere, if you want to track it down) and is justly celebrated as one of Bertolucci's masterpieces. Based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, the film tells the story of a callow Italian (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) who -- perhaps due to having a morphine addict for a mother, a father in the nut house and having been sexually molested by a chauffeur when he was young -- becomes a kind of cultural-political weather vane. He joins the fascists when Mussolini is in power, and even participates in the assassination of an old liberal professor of his, now exiled in Paris, but just as quickly turns to denouncing his former friends as collaborators when Il Duce is suddenly deposed. His political confusion is matched by his sexual ambivalence; he won't sleep with his shallow-but beautiful fiancee (Stefania Sandrelli) but gets turned on when he sees a former prostitute, played by Dominique Sanda, try to go down on her.

And who amongst us wouldn't?

As much as I enjoy hearing aging film nerds try out their pronunciation of "mise en scene" on each other, I was rather disappointed by the level of discourse on display last night. The 7:40 screening was sold-out, of course, and I spent the moments before showtime trying to mentally prepare myself for two-plus hours of monumental physical discomfort, much in the fashion Harry Houdini readied himself to be locked in a safe and lowered into the East River. This is where all that yoga and meditation really come in handy. Sadly, the trio behind me intruded on my mind-emptying exercises. They were two men and a woman and I couldn't figure out the configuration -- was one of the men on a date with the woman and the other guy a third wheel? Were the two men dating and the woman but a friend? My gaydar always goes haywire downtown but clearly there was some unfamiliarity between the three: they were going through topics -- Pirro vs. Hillary, searches on the subway -- like appetizers at an Indian restaurant.

"What do you think of this woman camped out in Crawford?" one of them asked, referring to Cindy Sheehan, the mother of soldier slain in Iraq who is seeking an audience with the president. This led to a general fit of Bush-bashing:

"You know, he's just such an idiot."

"A robot could do his job."

"He only does what his daddy wants."

Ad nauseum. I take a back seat to no one in my objection to GWB and his policies, was on the frontlines of the get-out-the-vote move for Kerry (see "Scranton" on the Articles page) but folks, this is no way to mount a counter-offensive. First of all, it's pretty much a matter of record that the elder sushi-barfing Bush (to borrow Anne LaMott's felicitous phrase) was opposed to the invasion of Iraq. Secondly, dismissing W as a robot misses the point: a lot of Americans seem to relate to his awkwardness before the microphone, and certainly preferred it to Kerry's. (Might be an insult to robots, too: think Jude Law in AI.) And my fellow disenfranchised dems, we could use such an idiot if we ever want to see the inside of the Oval Office again. Knee-jerk condescension won't get us anywhere. Now is not the time for conformity.

posted by Sean Elder @ 11:10 AM  0 comments

The hole in the waterfall

I had planned to go to the gym on my lunch hour today (working freelance in midtown this summer) but my plans were thwarted by an officious functionary at the NY Sports Club at 48th and 6th. Though I've been breezing in there at various times since I started this job, no one had ever stopped me before -- even though it seems I have a "gold membership" that, oxymoronically, is worth less than the standard membership. It turns out that I'm not supposed to just walk into any gym I want (and NYSC has hundreds) any time I feel like, I'm only supposed to be there at "off peak hours," which begin at 2 pm.

I've been a member of this gym since Jesus played varsity and I tend to forget the terms, I guess. I don't think I've ever been to this particular location before 2, lunch hour being generally agreed upon as an hour falling between 12-2, so I was surprised to be stopped by a young woman with a stud in her nose at 1:40. I think she must have been a new manager or someone who just completed some kind of training because she seemed very invested in thwarting my best efforts to sweet talk my way past her.

"You'll have to come back in twenty minutes," she said as the towel boys behind her rolled their eyes. They knew the place was emptying out.

"But I only have an hour for lunch," I reasoned. "That won't give me time to work out, shower..." But she wasn't having any of it.

A colleague of mine breezed past. "What's the problem?" she asked.

"This woman has an attitude," I said matter-of-factly, knowing the case was already lost.

"I don't have an attitude," the 90-day wonder insisted. "I"m just explaining the terms of your membership."

I left with my gym bag, muttering oaths as I went. I hit the bricks without a destination. Tourists from Times Square were spilling over into the Diamond District ("Look, mommy, Jews!") and I had planned the day all wrong. I had even had a couple Krispy Kreme donuts with my coffee this morning feeling guiltless -- yeah, so what? I'm going to the gym. Now I was as aimless as a Gus Van Sant movie.

I wandered around the corner and walked between the buildings toward 49th Street. There's an artificial waterfall there with a tunnel running through it. Today tourists were queued up to take pictures there. I ended up at a Japanese dive called Sapporo, ordering the katsu-don and feeling rather unimaginative. There was some sweet soul music in the air, above the hissing and clanking sounds the chefs were making behind the counter, and it took a minute before I ID'd the singer. It was a best-of-Etta-James collection and I was amazed to find the Japanese cooks singing along to "Something's Gotta Hold On Me". It occurred to me, reading my Janet Malcolm book and chewing on my cutlet, that if that sourpuss hadn't blocked my attempt to work out I wouldn't have taken that walk through the waterfall and made it there to hear their chorus ("Oh, it must be ruv!"). I figured I owed her one.

posted by Sean Elder @ 4:11 PM  1 comments

On the road again

It was confirmed yesterday that Walter Salles (Motorcycle Diaries, Central Station) would direct a film version of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, ending producer Francis Coppola's search for the right director, a quest that has seemed longer than Godfather III. Coppola has owned the rights to the beat bible forever and once thought of directing it himself, but this was before he directed Jack (in which Robin Williams played a little boy who never grew up or an old man who wouldn't shut up or something) and turned all of his creative abilities to making wine and building high-end ecotourist resorts in Central America.

First Francis grappled with the problem of how to convert the wordy, rather plotless book into a screenplay. One early version involved the use of some software of his own devising that allowed you to pour the text of a book into it in novel form only to have it emerge formatted as a script. Sadly the screenplay that emerged was about a thousand pages long and unfilmable. Undaunted, he garnered publicity for the on-again-off-again project with an open casting call in New York for potential unknowns to play the film's lead characters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (based on Kerouac and Neal Cassady). Grey sweatshirts and khaki pants were in short supply at the Gap that week but no stars were born as a result.

The quest for the right director seemed to reach a new low last year when Coppola announced that Joel Schumacher, best known as the man who killed Batman, was at the helm. And some bonafide Hollywood stars were attached as well, with Brad Pitt being mentioned as a potential Dean/Neal. (Nick Nolte played Cassady to John Heard's Kerouac in the rather lifeless 1980 film Heart Beat; no less a Cassady cohort than Prankster Ken Babbs said that Nolte had already played Cassady, or a character directly inspired by the legendary wheelman, in the film version of Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, inexplicably retitled Who'll Stop the Rain? And done a hell of a job.)

Meanwhile, every writer in creation was approached to have a go at the script. A few years ago Coppola hired the relatively unknown Pete Rock (The Ambidextrist) to tackle adaptation chores though Russell Banks announced to the world that he had a lock on the job before then. I talked to Banks last year when I was trying to track down the film's status for a piece I was pitching to the New York Times. He admitted he had no idea where the project was at but had just heard that Salles might direct and was optimistic that On the Road might finally get into gear. Too bad for Banks; Salles has already announced that Jose Rivera, who wrote Motorcycle Diaries, will handle the writing.

The big question, of course, is does anybody care? Beat wannabes, young and old alike, won't be queuing up at the cineplex on opening weekend; that's square stuff, man. Remember, at St. Marks Bookstore in Manhattan they still keep all their Kerouac behind the counter 'cause the kids, and presumably the young at heart, still come in and steal it off the shelves. Jack probably doesn't care, he ain't getting paid nohow...

posted by Sean Elder @ 4:03 PM  1 comments

tra la la la la

Saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf on Broadway last week, great seats at a deep discount (who would have thought sixty bucks would ever seem like a bargain?). I think the enduring appeal of that play might be that married couples, who still make up a good portion of any theater audience, come out saying, "Well, maybe our marriage isn't so bad after all!" The Longacre Theater does not offer booze at intermission and there were quite a few disappointed patrons at the first intermission, many of whom could have clearly used a stiff drink or two. Plenty of ersatz booze being belted back on stage, of course.

This production is indeed Kathleen Turner's show. From her opening line ("God, what a dump!") to her final answer to the question posed in the title, she rules what remains of that rundown roost George and Martha are doomed to inhabit. She looks like she has been in training for the role in years past, enjoying the pleasures life has to offer without frequent breaks for the gym, and her Martha has a blowsy quality that Liz Taylor's lacked. (Besides, I could never understand how a woman who looked like Liz was doing languishing in nowheresville.) She owns the role and put Taylor out of my mind for the evening.

I wish I could say the same of Bill Irwin's George. Though I liked the kinetic, almost Robin Williams quality of his jesting (seeing him trade bons mots with the hapless Nick was like watching McEnroe play tennis with the ball boy) and was won over by his abstract take on the disappointed, cuckolded "associate professor" (as Martha continuously reminds him) he let me down in the last act. That's when you need George to turn around, to reveal that beneath the animosity is a deep well of concern for his wife -- as Richard Burton does so convincingly in the film -- and I wasn't feeling it on Wednesday.

Maybe it was an off night, who knows? Wed is a matinee day and after going through that Walpurgisnacht twice the actors may be a bit spent (though Turner didn't show it). The couple's evening guests, Nick and Honey (played here by David Harbour and Mireille Enos) are rather hapless foils; though Enos makes the most of her role, milking it for the laughs the playwright built into it, I didn't find Harbour sexy enough to raise the amount of steam that clouds the evening. All the great lines are in place ("But that's all blood under the bridge"; "Georgie-porgie, put-upon-pie") and the play stands up. But since Albee shocked Broadway with its first staging 44 years ago, a lot of people have copied his style; in how many final acts have you seen characters unmasked, forced to face their illusions, psychologically burned to the ground to face the harsh light of Truth?

The amazing thing about George and Martha is that they endure, even their marriage endures. Though Albee was about thirty when he wrote WAVW, it still seems like a young man's play: fuck you, mom and dad! He even named them after the parents of our country. But as Nick and Honey learn the hard way, no one knows what really holds a marriage together except the two people bound to each other. It is a lesson for the young, and a humbling one.

posted by Sean Elder @ 12:27 PM  0 comments

The other side of Liberty

Leaving Franny's camp on Monday we stopped in the neighboring town of Liberty, NY for a quick lunch -- only to discover water pouring into the car underneath the dashboard on the passenger side. I may not be one of the Tappet brothers but I know that's not a good thing. After eating half an Italian sub while Peggy had a slice of pizza, all the while listening the an endless tale of woe by the guy in the next counter over (his wife had thrown him out the trailer, monthly disability checks were less than he used to make driving a forklift in a week, his father-in-law just plain didn't like him) I found a gas station with a garage and had the problem quickly diagnosed. A hose running from the air conditioner was supposed to drain water and was clogged up, causing the small flood in the front seat. We elected to have him address the problem while cooling our heels in the garage's waiting room.

There we encountered another sad example of local destitution: a young couple with a two-year-old child who were waiting for their own car to be fixed. They had their groceries with them -- Fruit Loops, Oreos, large bottles of soda -- and seemed unusually agitated. They were both rail thin, with bad teeth and seemingly no volume control: whether talking about the car or which soap opera to watch on the garage's TV, they shouted at each other in an unenunciated mush of reproach that sounded to me like a parody of the family in Napoleon Dynamite. I lived in a number of redneck towns growing up, though none quite as destitute as Sullivan County seems to be now, and pegged them for a somewhat familiar brand of local loser. Until I got a look at the young mother's bruised, scabby legs and realized the awful truth: They were meth freaks.

Not to sound naive. I certainly encountered a lot of speed freaks in my youth, at rock concerts and on the streets of San Francisco, especially in the Haight. And I have been reading a lot of press coverage about the nation's meth epidemic, including the cover story in this week's Newsweek but I thought of it as...out there. Like Oklahoma. But one look in this woman's eyes -- she asked Peggy for money after she said hi to her toddler -- told the tale. The little girl was adorable: blond haired and blue-eyed, she could have come off a Sunbeam bread bag. She was also seemingly unmonitored by mom or dad. They kvetched like Job about everything while their daughter ran in and out of a rather dangerous environment.

Though probably not as dangerous as the one she faces at home. Of all the horror stories about meth addiction -- a scourge that is literally sweeping rural America, like a white-trash crack epidemic -- the worst are about the children. Neglected, abused, exposed to the worst sorts of depravation they are part of a new generation of the damned. The closing line of my last post, re the Pillowman, seems callous in retrospect. That play concerns an author who writes stories about children being abused, having witnessed the same thing happening to his brother. They're both dead by play's end, as those meth freak parents may be in short order. But the girl will live on.

Postscript: In Slate's Press Box today Jack Shafer challenges the Newsweek piece saying, among other things, the magazine gives no figures for how many lives meth has actually claimed. I guess that all depends on how you define living.

posted by Sean Elder @ 10:09 AM  0 comments

Acting out

My wife and I drove our daughter to Stagedoor Manor today, a theater camp located in the Catskills. Some of her friends had been before and now Franny was determined to try her luck on the boards. It turns out that the camp has quite a pedigree -- both Natalie Portman and Robert Downey, Jr. are mentioned among the alumni which means she has an equally good chance of playing a stripper or becoming a junkie -- and was the inspiration for the movie Camp, which I didn't see.

As camps go the buildings were nothing special; my wife reasoned that the dank and depressing hallways and mildewed bathrooms were meant to give the aspiring thespians a reality check: Get used to it, kids! For all I know they take them into town on field trips and make them work as waitresses. Given the camps great rep (at the end of each three week session the kids mount several productions, a musical and a drama, that are supposed to be quite professional in appearance) there were quite a few bona fide stage kids in evidence. Voices were raised in song at nearly every corner -- not, by and large, songs I wanted to hear but all sounded like current Broadway fare. There was a fair amount of air-kissing and squealing on the part of returning campers and that was just the boys. No actually, boys were in short supply (surprise) but any lucky enough to be straight would do quite well there, I reckon. The hallway in Franny's dorm was adorned with a "Wall of Hotness" featuring pics of dreamy young barechested lads ripped from the pages of today's teen mags. And no, the same photos were not on the walls of the boys's dorm. You're mean.

Speaking of mean, Franny looked a little freaked out when we left her. She is rooming with a friend who has been there before and she is down the hall from yet another old friend from school -- but if you have a daughter in middle-school you know that such alliances are built on sand when you are twelve. I figure they will grow to hate and love each other several times over before we pick her up in three weeks time. Not for nothing did the three of them sing the song "Loathing" from the musical Wicked in her school's last musicale. And boy, did they nail it. You would have thought they had a dry ice machine backstage.

I heard one girl telling a parent that there was quite a bit of buzz about what musicals were going to be performed but when asked she said no one cared about the drama. The Bad Seed might seem a little dated to these kids. I wonder how they would do with The Pillowman?

posted by Sean Elder @ 6:48 PM  0 comments